Month: February 2019

I thought it might be fun (I use this word loosely) to take you on a sampling of a week in the life of me:

Sunday: Reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn and feeling overwhelmed by this knowingness that the only thing that is going to save us from extinction is a fundamental shift in worldview. 

Monday: Still feeling overwhelmed if not a bit helpless about the state of humanity and therefore not overly excited to face and rally my students with a sense of hope. I get through it.

Tuesday: Still not feeling it. My daily A Course in Miracles lesson pisses me off, because I feel that the way that the lesson is stated is counterproductive if not just off altogether relative to how I am understanding our predicament. My brain races into thoughts that I should just give it all up… teaching, blogging, fighting in any way whatsoever. I’m sure that’s what all of the wisdom traditions would have me do- stop fighting. Then right off the bat as I walk into school a student chases me down with begging questions. You know- the big questions… about life. Actually, he is not one of my students. Yet as many students have, he heard about me and sat in on one of my classes in which we work on this very issue of shifting our worldview. He desperately wanted to talk to me about Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, and such. O.K., God. Fine. I’ll talk. And talk we did for a good half hour, right there at the top of the stairs, about the depths of life. Then I immediately got thrown into a grand opening in which we all pretended that our new fabrication center is fully functional when it is far from. My heart breaks every time I have to face how severely we underserve students who have been underserved their entire lives. Yet the day ends on a high note as my students, Shannon and I meet with a passive house builder who is interested in helping us to implement our net zero home for low-income communities in Houston.

Wednesday: A meme with a dancing 3 year old girl makes me smile deeply and warms my heart.

Thursday: First thing when I get to school I check what the discussion is that day for my class. It’s evolution day. Uh-oh! I have to get my game on. This is always one of the most animated days in class. It was awesome. I absolutely love giving students permission to say what they really think, to talk it out with them, and to watch light bulbs going off when they begin to understand that there are different ways to see things than how they have been presented to us in the past. From there I walked into a major review for my design studio. It was a fairly large fail for my students- they aren’t where they should be. Five years ago I would have blown a gasket. Not now. Instead, the outside reviewer (who happens to be a close friend and ally) and I, turned it into a perfect failure… the kind that leaves the students understanding what they can really do and what impact they will have because of it. It was awesome. My day ends with a meme of a dancing 5 year old girl that makes me smile deeply and warms my heart. 

Friday: It’s a full day on the run, doing my dance in the world. The first meeting of the day is in town to work with the City and potential community partners to bring that net zero, low income housing to fruition. Then it’s a race across town for a meeting with my client and the contractor for a building I am working on. Yes, I still have my own architectural practice in the midst of all of this. The day ends with me swearing in Houston traffic as I am trying to get to Shannon and Sara, the goalie mentioned in my “Friendship Guide” post, who was here visiting for a few days. A tasty dinner and good company settled me down. 

Saturday: I’m tired, but Shannon and Sara convince me to go to the rock climbing gym with them nonetheless. Something about struggling my way up the wall makes me feel like I can do it, whatever it is.

I could go into more depth about any one of these things or any of the million other things that crossed my radar and provoked me this week, but you know what I am going to choose today? Dance! Because sometimes in life, you just have to dance. So just for fun, this is going to be my history of dance. I mean specifically the history of me dancing.

As a young girl, you would not have caught me boldly dancing with abandon in front of a camera, or in front of anybody for that matter. I was a shy kid. Being the center of attention was not, and is still not, my thing. Of course these days I am at the center quite a lot- teaching, public speaking, running meetings, managing projects, etc.- and I am fortunately at ease there, but that took a lot of practice. You might imagine that not wanting to be the center of attention was a bit of a problem for a gymnast. It was. Gymnastics forced me to start facing my shyness early on. It forced me to start dancing, in public. I hated that part of it. I hated competing in general for the same reason. The way that I dealt with it was to just get through it… with as little motion or expression as was physically possible. It was like saying to the judges and spectators, “We all know that I have to do this routine, so I am just going to do it in the least interesting way possible so that you either won’t watch or maybe will only watch with complete disinterest.” That worked pretty well for me. I mean it worked well for the outcome I was after. It did not produce good scores!

In the meantime, when I was alone and sure that nobody was watching, I would ham it up. The truth was that I rather enjoyed moving my body (still do). I just didn’t like people watching me move my body (still don’t). My mom would occasionally catch me and with complete exasperation exclaim, “Why don’t you do that at the gym???!!!” But I just couldn’t. I was so bad at the expressive side of gymnastics that my mom signed me up for real ballet lessons. Gymnasts do a certain amount of dance lessons within the context of their training, but that clearly wasn’t working for me. So she took me to a retired ballerino from the Houston Ballet. Because I did have some skills from gymnastics, I was put into a class of actual aspiring ballerinas. Yikes. One day this danseur noble was teaching us a new sequence. Somewhere in my focus on just trying to get it right so that I didn’t stick out, I lost myself in it. Then suddenly, I caught him out of the corner of my eye excitingly waving his arms in the air. Then I noticed the most frightening thing ever- everyone else had stopped dancing and they were staring at me. He was waving his arms at me. I was mortified. I immediately froze. That prompted him to put his hands on his head and exclaim, “Why did you stop???? You were the only one doing it right!!!” Oh. Who knew???

Nobody knew for a very long time. Except for perhaps my mom, that is. She would tell my coaches, but they certainly did not believe her. While the ballet lessons were phased out, dance lessons continued in the gym. My favorite was from a jazz dancer. She introduced us to isolations, in which you isolate each part of your body so that you can move it independently and with a greater range of motion. It is challenging. I was intrigued. I spent quite a lot of time practicing those isolations at home in front of the mirror. Of course nobody knew that, because they never saw me use my newfound freedom of movement. That is, not until one fateful day…

It was summer and time to have our new floor routines choreographed. The year was 1984. I was fourteen. Step one is picking the music. My music had always been the most conservative (stiff) thing that we could come up with. We had again found just such an option for me. Yet in the privacy of my own room I had fallen in love with the basketball theme music for the LA Olympics. It was jazzy. Quite. It resonated with me so much that I did something crazy. I took it to my coach and asked him if I could use it. He looked at me like I was nuts. But something in me wasn’t going to back off. He finally agreed that we would cut two options for my music and let the choreographer decide which to use. I agreed with that plan.

We had taken a team trip to Austin to work with this really good choreographer. It was an all day affair with each of us waiting in the lobby of the gym while she worked with us one at a time. It was finally my turn. I felt her sizing me up as I walked across the empty gym to meet her and my coach at the floor. As I arrived she looked me over one more time for good measure. My coach explained to her the situation and steered her toward the conservative music. She listened to both and then without hesitation stepped onto the floor and said “Do this.” It was a tuck jump to straddle landing followed by a knee and shoulder shimmy thingy. Shit. What had I done? She knew. She had my number and she wasn’t about to let me off of the hook. There was only one thing I could do. I obliged. Perfectly. Her response: “Thought so. We are going with the jazzy music.” Then she proceeded to choreograph what was a very jazzy routine for that day and age, as my coach watched in complete bewilderment.

Unfortunately I never got to compete that routine. I never got to that moment of revealing what I had been hiding all along. I blew out my knee instead, effectively ending my career. But I never stopped loving to dance. No one ever suspects it. On the rare occasion that someone gets to see me really move, shock is always the response. Here is a fun little case in point. I was pretty straight laced when I started college. I had never been the partying type. So much so that I didn’t drink much or go out very early on in my college career. My freshman year I mostly only went to hockey team social functions. At one such event, for whatever reason, the music moved me to dance. Hip hop was our music of choice. Shocked, one of my teammates blurted out what became my (primary) hockey nickname: Shellmaster Flash. It was like my secret super hero identity, the superman to my Clark Kent. My super power: dancing. It was fitting and it stuck. This past summer Grandmaster Flash played the Princeton reunions. Alls I am saying is, me and my namesake resonated. He could see me and he knew. At the end we gave each other a high ten and embraced our fingers for an extended moment of mutual appreciation. Sometimes, people, you just have to dance.

So I kind of had to throw some theory in my last post “Human Things” to talk about what I want to talk about next. In general, my intent is to always talk from an experiential perspective, it’s just that my experience is highly informed by stinking thinking! So to give insight into what I grapple with requires sharing what I am thinking about from time to time. I think (see???) what I am going to do is label posts that are strictly theoretical with a “Rated T” at the top. That way you know what you are in for and can either skip it or more easily refer back to it later. It’s also my intent to keep theoretical posts well spread out so as not to overwhelm.

O.K., now about attachment. Let me just be blunt. I love attachment! I mean I get attached. If you think I was attached to that umbrella, do I have some stories for you! Take my shoes for instance. Anyone who knows me well knows how I love my shoes. Yet I’m not one of those people with a closet full of shoes. Oh no. I only need my favorites. My normal rotation at the moment includes 3 pairs of dress shoes and 1 pair of casual sneakers. Yes, I have other shoes in both categories, but I only ever wear the ones that I am attached to (aka, my favorites). And I will wear them until they are worn out. It’s not that I don’t want new ones, it’s that having to retire one of my favorite things makes me so sad. And frankly, I am a creature of habit so I am pretty much only going to have 3-4 shoes in my rotation at a time. That means adding new ones necessitates letting go of old ones.

You think I’m weird, don’t you? How about cars then? I know a lot of people get attached to their cars. I sure do. My current car is a sporty red 4 door Mini. It has a name. Of course it has a name. Bernie is the fastest car (by far) that I have ever owned. And I love it. That said, my previous car was a silver Matrix named Myles. If you have known me for any amount of time you probably rode in Myles at some point. I drove Myles for 13 years and over 200,000 miles. Myles took me all over Texas coaching hockey. Myles transported my kids, my dogs, my coworkers, my friends and at least half of the 2006 Women’s U.S. Olympic Ice Hockey Team (not all at once, mind you). Myles saved my life twice. The first of those two incidents I thought was for sure the end of Myles, but a major surgery later and he was right back on the road. When I finally had to retire Myles a few years ago, it was- and I am not at all exaggerating- excruciating. I was super excited about Bernie, but that didn’t matter. When I handed over the keys the car sales woman could tell I was about to lose it and uttered this big sympathetic “aaaaaaw” as if I was the most pathetic little thing she had ever encountered.

Not a car person either? O.K., how about places? Like, say, my childhood room for instance. We moved into the home that my parents still live in when I was 5 years old. At some point early on my mom let us each pick what color we wanted to paint our room, so long as we painted it with her. I picked the brightest kelly green you have ever seen. My dad made me a trundle bed and painted it white with little pink flowers. There was a matching wardrobe, toy box, and desk/shelving unit with pink and light blue shelves, also made by Dad. In one corner was (is, actually) this huge stuffed buffalo that my dad won for me at Astroworld. I loved that moment and I loved having that dang buffalo take up a whole corner of my room. In the opposite corner next to my bed was a stuffed, rainbow colored (um… nevermind 🙂 ) hot air balloon hanging from the ceiling. I had fallen in love with that balloon during one of our annual summer camping trips to Durango and my parents were kind enough to get it for me and cart the thing home (it wasn’t like it could be deflated, it was stuffed!) Behind my headboard were stuffed letters that spelled out my name with stuffed clouds surrounding it. It was one, big pillowy heaven with all of my gymnastics heroes hanging on the wall. And it was greener than the grass. I loved it. I never ever got tired of my room, particularly the color of it. It was still that exact way when I left for college, and frankly it is still that exact way today (although it is also doubling as a storage closet for all of my grandmother’s old antiques which my mother is still waiting for me to go through with her…one of these days, Mom.)

My point is, when I left for college it was rough leaving my little haven behind. Not that I didn’t create a little nest with every move. Every single one of my college dorm rooms was special in some way. My sophomore year I actually got these glow in the dark star stickers and I proceeded to create the constellations on my ceiling. It made me so freaking happy to look up at those stars from my loft bed every night. Hmmmm…I wonder if they are still there and who else might have enjoyed them (or been extremely annoyed by them as the case may be)! Every year I had a rough time abandoning my college nest at the end of the school year. As for Princeton in general… and maybe you can all relate to this… leaving college sucked. Royally. I resonate with that place at a deep level. It is like home.

Have you gotten the picture? I get attached! Now the thing about it is that all of the wise people tell us that attachment is a bad thing. Oh and your financial advisor, if you have such a thing, will tell you too- don’t get attached to your house. Not a good investment. Attachment bad. I get it. I get why they are saying it too. Let’s break it down, shall we? First off, what is the deal with me??? Why all of this attachment? I’m sure you all have your own theories brewing, but let me tell you a little more about my experience. The thing about it for me is… I feel things. No, no, I don’t mean I have feelings (although, yes, I do… shocking as that may be to some), I mean I feel things. Every single thing that I described above is a dead thing, right? It’s matter. It’s just stuff. Just a bunch of molecules smushed together. Put another way, there is no spirit in any of it. Right? Well, that’s what Descartes said anyway. That’s also what most of us continue to say. It is of the material world and therefore by (Cartesian) definition it is not of the spirit world. Are we sure?

Last time I checked my high school physics lessons, E=MC². In case you you have forgotten: energy = mass times the speed of light squared. In other words, energy is nothing more than mass (matter, material stuff) moving very, very, very fast. Put another way, mass (matter, material stuff) is energy moving…… in……. super……. super…….. super…….. slow…….. motion. Huh. Matter and energy are the same thing? I will get into this more in some future theory segment, but we have also known for over 100 years that at the quantum level particles (material stuff) and waves (energy stuff) are, you guessed it, the same thing. So… there is no spirit (energy) in the material stuff (matter), eh? Think again. Better yet, check your own experience. We are all nothing more than energy moving in super slow motion (relative to, say, the speed of light). Energy resonates- it moves in waves. I resonate. You resonate. We all resonate. Guess what else resonates? That’s right, things. Every single stinking thing resonates. Every last bit of the material universe. It’s all energy, resonating.

So why do the wise ones tell us not to get attached to these resonating things? Are they wrong? No. But I do believe that we have tended to misinterpret the message, both in the giving and the receiving of it. What we generally hear when we are told “don’t get attached” is “don’t get attached to the objective world- abide in spirit instead.” We take this to mean that the objective world is a throw away. It isn’t our real home. If you get attached to it, then you will preclude yourself from reaching your true home, which abides in spirit. Doesn’t that sound right? Yet what happens to this idea when we consider that perhaps the material world is nothing but energy. For me, energy is the equivalent of spirit. If that is the case, now what? To attach or not to attach, that is the question. Actually, this isn’t the question at all, because what is happening here is a confusion of terms.

Let’s return to my shoes. For me, all things- inanimate or otherwise- are energy/spirit, moving in super slow motion of course. Things don’t contain energy, they are energy. In my mind, a shoe is made up of all of the energy that went into its making. This includes the energy that went into the materials of which it is made as well as the energy that went into the design of it as well as the energy that went into the making of it as well as the energy that went into the packaging and delivery of said shoe to my foot. In this way, my shoes ground me and connect me to the earth by putting me into an energetic relationship with, well… everything else.

If this is difficult to imagine, think about the relationship between you and your food. The food that you eat quite literally becomes you. It becomes you in both material and energetic forms, if you insist on thinking these separate things. The nutrients become your new cells. The energy animates your actions in the world. But go even deeper. The food that you eat is a physical history of every energy that went into its formation. You may think it crazy, but the Buddhists have good reason to advise us not to eat angry chicken. That anger is literally stored in the material body of the chicken and when you eat it, it is physically/energetically transferred into you and becomes you. Seriously, friends, don’t eat angry chicken. And by the way, you don’t need to eat something to absorb its energy. Energy moves quite readily without any material interaction. It also moves with and as material. Are you getting the picture?… there is no escaping energy transfer.

This process of transferring and structurally incorporating energy from one thing into another thing has no end. My shoes go right on absorbing and incorporating the energy of me and my feet and everywhere we visit. That’s because all things are profoundly interconnected energetically, which is to say there is no real separation between the energy of this or that. Put simply, all things are energetically in relationship with one another. According to this worldview, I am by the very nature of existence in an energetic relationship with my shoes. And by extension, I am also in relationship with everything that went into the design and construction of my shoes. It can then be said that what is actually happening between me and my favorite shoes is that we are resonating together. Likewise, my car contains the energetic imprint of every person who has ever ridden in it, every place we have ever visited, and every event it has ever been involved in. The energetic imprint of my life from the ages of 5 to 22 is embedded in the green paint on the walls of my childhood bedroom, as well as everything else in there. I in turn carry the energetic imprint of all of these things around in me. The resonance between me and the things in my life is real.

So what to do with attachment? The issue that I am raising here is that we tend to confuse the word “attachment” with the word “relationship.” Too often, when we hear “don’t get attached”, our minds go right to… “don’t get into a relationship.” Yet it is impossible, as I hope I have explained above, to not be in relationship with the things in your life, be they thing things, plant things, animal things, or human things. If a thing has ever crossed your path, you are in relationship with it… even it if is no longer “in your life.” Actually, when thought through completely, there is nothing in existence that you are not in relationship with. I am in a loving relationship with my favorite shoes, my car, and the places I inhabit. That is to say that we resonate together, we support one another, we respect one another, we value one another, and so on. That, to me, is a proper relationship between me and the things in my life.

What is not helpful, as the wise ones would say, is for me to treat any of these things as a possession. This is the rub. The second we turn any type of thing (human things included) into a possession, we have objectified it. We have robbed it of its spirit. We have made it into something much less than what it actually is. If we hold on too tightly, we will prevent it from fully actualizing its own unique potential in the world. That is as disrespectful of spirit as anything can be. That is what holds us in chains. When we hold back a thing by seeing it as less than the divine being that it is, we by extension diminish our own self. When we honor every other thing as spirit, we honor our own self as spirit. Then, and only then, are we all free. So the next time you hear some wise one telling you to practice non-attachment, think non-possession. But by all means, be in relationship with, resonate with, and deeply love all of the things in your life. When it is time for something to go, really, do as Kondo says. She has it right. Thank it for its service and send it off with love.

This is a bonus midweek post, just because! Actually, it is because of something specific. This past weekend my gymnastics team got together for the first time in over 30 years. Nor had I seen any of them in that span of time either. It’s a funny thing for me. If you met me up until the age of 18, you know me as a gymnast. If you met me after that, you know me as a hockey player. It’s like leading a double life. No matter what side of that equation you fall on, or even if you are just now getting to know me via this blog, then this is just going to be a fun little post to share a little story about my life as a gymnast. I’ll try not to jump into the deep end… but no promises!

So about this reunion- it was a spur of the moment thing (almost). One of our teammates, who now lives in Seattle, was going to be in town for his son’s gymnastics meet. He reached out to those of us he is connected to on FB to see if anyone might want to get together not knowing if he would even get a response. We all jumped on it! Some people even drove in from out of town. I had no idea how it was going to play out, but I certainly didn’t expect this- it was pure joy. I don’t think any of us expected that exactly. Yet we all knew for sure that this thing had to happen.

You see we were the original team of Bill Austin’s Gymnastics. Bill coached for over 30 years before retiring, so a whole lot of gymnasts passed through his doors after us. But we were the originals. We started with Bill when he first opened his gym in a tiny warehouse sandwiched between other warehouses in a row of warehouses. The gym was so small that you really had to be careful that you didn’t collide with somebody when dismounting whatever you happened to be dismounting! Our team was co-ed, which was not overly common. Usually a gym specializes in one or the other. We spent A LOT of time together both in and out of the gym. We spent almost every last dime of our childhoods together. We carpooled. We had team slumber parties. We went to watch college gymnastics meets together. We went on international trips for meets- Bermuda, Mexico City. And within all of that we had a good deal of unsupervised time. Look, it was the 70’s. Things were a whole lot looser back then! We had a blast. Yes, we worked our rears off. Yes, we were all not so secretly terrified of Bill. But we had an absolutely crazy, amazing, fabulous blast.

We moved with Bill, twice for many of us, as the gym expanded. I think what we had all forgotten is that we had become a family. That means that we have essentially been estranged from our family for over 30 years. Our reunion was surreal. We all laughed so hard and smiled so much that it brought back to life what probably feels like a different lifetime for most of us. And yet there it was… just the same. I felt at home. I think we all did. The thing is that when a gymnastics career ends, or transitions to a new gym, the truth is that it is traumatic. Every athlete can relate. It’s the same when your college, national, or professional career ends. 

I am happy to report that I was awarded not just one, but two titles at my gymnastics reunion. The first title… and don’t go feeling bad for my teammates about this, because frankly they did a whole lot more winning than I did back then!…. is the “Looks the Same” award. I will say there was a very close runner up, and the truth is we all looked really great. Gymnastics has served us well. The second title, which not everybody heard, but I and at least one other person did so I am just going to go ahead on and put it out there- Bill gave me “His Proudest Moment” award. Now, now, teammates, he is proud of all of us, so just let me have my day! Here is the story behind it:

I was in no way a naturally talented gymnast. Not. At. All. I was a tomboy. I fall more on the naturally talented hockey player scale. But I loved it, so I persisted. To make a long story short, I wasn’t the best vaulter (or anything else) in my early career. So much so that I drove Bill to blow a gasket one day. That day actually changed my life. He yelled at me for making the same mistake for the umpteenth time. When Bill yelled, the entire gym reverberated. I was deeply embarrassed. But Bill wasn’t having it. He then proceeded to yell something at me that I had never heard before. He yelled, “Lift up your head! Have a little pride in yourself!!!” What did he just say? Is he crazy??? I decided he was certifiably crazy, but I lifted my head because I didn’t know what crazy might do next if I didn’t. Something magical happened when I did. Somehow, someway, a little self-respect found its way in. After that, I decided that if I had to work 10 times as hard as everybody else to get there, that was what I was going to do. So I did. I became a talented gymnast late in my career…. in a career which you don’t have time to be late in! But nonetheless, it changed everything.

Flash forward a few years from that moment and I had become, more than anything, a talented vaulter. Bill’s proudest moment came the first time that I competed a tsukahara. Instead of me trying to explain it, just look it up on YouTube. All you need to know for this story is that it involves a one and half back flip off of the horse. Unfortunately, my nerves got the best of me and I came on to the vault too high, which meant that I got zero block (the maneuver that gets you height off of the horse), which meant that I got zero rotation off of the horse. I was heading for a seriously bad crash landing. I knew it. I also knew that if I didn’t do something drastic I was going to land on my neck, and when that happens all bets are off on the rest of your life. I instinctively reached out of the flip back for the floor and luckily (or perhaps skillfully!) flip-flopped out of it. If that sounded graceful, let me assure you this was every bit a crash landing.

It scared the shit out of me. It scared the shit out of Bill. It scared the shit out of every spectator watching. And more than anything it scared the shit out of the judges (which, in retrospect, made it slightly fun)! After making sure I was alright, Bill asked me what I wanted to do. You see I had to do a second vault. Call me crazy, but I knew I had to do it again. He said, “Go for it.” When I put up the number telling the judges that I would be doing another tsuk, I am pretty sure they all crawled under the judges table because they weren’t about to watch! Truly, this was the sweetest revenge that I ever got on those pesky judges! And… I did it! Actually, I overdid it… I over-rotated the second one and fell back on my butt. It didn’t matter. I had proven that I could do it. And I had given Bill what would be his proudest moment of his 30 year coaching career. It was the least I could do.

What I want to leave you with right now is that this thing I am calling interbeing is about connection. Seeking it isn’t all about the heavy lifting of exposing our shadows to get our selves out of our own way. The full experience of interbeing does require that, but that is just so that we can connect with others in a deeper, more meaningful way. But it also requires just good old fashioned connecting with the people who cross your path at any level that it happens to occur at. I’ve said this before, and it can’t be said enough- our relationships are precious. Really, they are everything.

Nothing is as simple as it seems, and yet the most profound truths are as simple as pie. This is my umbrella observation for the paradox that is life. I can’t say it enough. Life is both/and. To be sure that it is either this or that is a sure sign that we have used our life reducing powers to cut out most of the rest of the truth. We all do it. We have to. The full complexity of it all is too overwhelming to handle.

This leads to the great paradox in my quest for a state of interbeing. To rephrase what this is about, it is my earnest attempt to find a mode of being that will support our evolution as a species (as opposed to the path that we are currently on, which is leading us to extinction). My own life is the site of my experiment. I’m taking you along for the ride via this blog. I’ll observe here that I wish my site were a whole lot less complicated!!! Yet, this is the material that I have to work with, so let’s get real.

It can all be distilled down to a simple umbrella. To the casual observer it was just an umbrella. To my wife, it was just an umbrella. And what is an umbrella anyway? It’s just this tool that we have created with a structure that pops up and collapses down to support a membrane that keeps us from getting wet in the one position and is easy to take along in the other. The umbrella is ubiquitous, which is to say that it is everywhere and probably most everyone has (at least) one (or has had one as the case may be). They come and go from our lives like pens or hair bands or cash. It’s nothing special. Unless it is.

I’m historically not very good at nurturing my physical being. This in part comes with the territory of having grown up as a competitive gymnast and in part from having a mother whose motto is “suck it up.” I learned at a very young age to suck it up. If you are not sore as a gymnast, you are not a gymnast. Sore is a constant state of being for that endeavor. Oh you have a “rip” on your hand that is bleeding profusely and hurts like hell? That’s nice. You must be a gymnast. It’s your turn at the bars. You are pushing through a sprained ankle, a strained knee, an overuse injury that has pushed your tendons to the brink. That’s just what you do. Don’t be mad at my coaches, my mom or anybody else in my story. All they wanted was for me to succeed in life. And for our society in general that requires pushing through obstacles, learning to be “gritty.”

Well I am most certainly gritty. I learned to disconnect from pain to the degree that nothing can stop me. But I’m not talking about the extreme stuff of Herculean athletic feats right now. What I am talking about is how that training seeps into everyday life. I need to pull an endless string of all-nighters to meet a deadline even though it is going to rack me physically? No problem. I’m getting sick but have classes to teach? No problem, I’ll be there. It’s pouring rain and I’m going to get soaking wet? No problem. Let’s face it, I’m not going to melt.

Shannon and age have brought me down to earth a bit on this front. I have been working to change these patterns over the last few years in an effort to learn how to nurture myself. For example, about four years ago my umbrella went missing. I had therefore experienced repeated incidents of getting soaking wet between my car and the architecture building. That wasn’t such an unusual experience for me. There was a time when I didn’t really even believe in umbrellas. Carrying one was a pain in the ass. Getting wet was much less inconvenient than having to carry that umbrella. But somewhere in my wise old age I decided that I was being ridiculous and bought into this whole umbrella thing. And then it went missing, as umbrellas do.

So one day I decided enough was enough. I went out of my way to carve time and space out of my extremely hectic schedule to go purchase a new umbrella. As you might surmise, I wasn’t overly experienced in this department, so I wasn’t really even sure what to buy. I knew that I had found it extremely helpful if it was compact so that I could store it easily in my backpack and not think about it. That answered nicely to my persistent feeling that carrying around an umbrella is a pain in the ass. I knew from experience that not all umbrellas were created equal in their ability to pop up and contract back down, and that can be particularly annoying when you are trying to transition from outside into a building or your even worse into your car. I also knew they have a tendency to break. So I went out in search of an umbrella that would keep me dry without annoying the hell out of me.

I just happened to luck upon it- the perfect umbrella. It was the right size of compact and had a wide closure band to compact it down even further. It was sleek and black with a single flashy red button on the handle, appealing to the architect in me. That magic button popped it up into place instantaneously. Seriously… pure magic. And it contracted back down with equal grace. It was a match made in heaven. For the past four years that umbrella has been my constant companion, albeit tucked away into the bottom of my backpack so that I only ever think about it when I need it. But when I need it, there it is.

This past Monday night I needed it. An unexpected downpour rolled in. We had worked late that night, so it was dark and we were tired. Shannon, who does an amazing job at self-nurturing, has ironically never quite turned the corner on umbrellas. She still doesn’t really believe in them, so she never has one. There is only ever one over her head when I happen to have mine and it is pouring. As we walked out to the car she gets the idea- because as I highlighted in “Sophie” this is how she is in the world- that after we get to the car she wants to drive back to the building to give our umbrella to another stranded professor who is also umbrellaless.

I immediately tightened up. You want to what? You want to give away my precious umbrella??? Are you crazy?! Well that last thought might not have literally seeped up into consciousness, but it was in there nonetheless. Of course I didn’t say any of that. I just tightened up. It would be one thing to give the umbrella to somebody who we see every day, but this professor only works late on Monday nights when we typically are not there. Once in the car, I pushed back a little on this idea to see how serious she was. “If we give away our only umbrella, then we won’t have one the next time we need one.” She responded that we have many more hanging in the entry at home. I had to think about that one. Was it true? It might be true. After the purchase of my precious umbrella, my old one had decided to stop hiding plus my mother had given us two more. It was true. But I didn’t use any of those umbrellas. They weren’t special to me. This one was. In the Kondonian sense, it brings me joy. It is my constant companion. The others, they can go. “Thank you for your service.”

So now I had a serious dilemma on my hands. To give or not to give, that is the question. I didn’t have much time or space to work it out in either. On the one hand, this umbrella represented self-nurture in a very concrete sense. That, as explained, is a critical evolution for me- to care for my self. On the other hand, the very concept of interbeing is to recognize that all definitions of self are by definition arbitrary. That is to say there is nowhere we can actually draw a concrete boundary that says where “I” begins and where it ends. And what that means is that the world that we experience is nothing more than our extended selves. There is no separation. In that light, to take care of this stranded professor is also to take care of my self, in the extended sense. Which self to choose?

I know full well that to give is to place myself in an ever increasing cycle of the gift network. This is to say that when we give, the gift comes back to us threefold, usually from some other direction. For example, if I give up my umbrella, I am setting myself up to receive an umbrella (or some other equivalent item) from somebody else should I ever find myself stranded. I know this. And yet still, we are talking about my precious umbrella here! I don’t want to part ways with it, not at all. So much so, that anger rose up in me. I was angry to have been put in a position to have to make this choice. If I held on to my umbrella, I honored my self while dishonoring my extended self. If I let go of my umbrella, I honored my extended self in trust that my self would be taken care of in the future- that I would be taken care of in the more general sense by the Beloved.

I would love to report to you that I came to a place that I was able to give my umbrella with an open heart and a sense of nurture toward my self, both extended and not. But that’s not what happened. Instead, I angrily relinquished my umbrella. I did so, because I did not want to be judged. I did so, because I felt I had to in order to be in “the right.” I most certainly did not do so out of love. As far as I was concerned, that professor could deal with her own damned inconvenience. She wasn’t going to melt, after all. I was so upset in the moment that I didn’t even get to say goodbye (to my umbrella). No “thank you for your service” was said. I couldn’t even look as Shannon delivered my precious umbrella. And I remained angry for a long time. Days.

I share all of this with you to be real in a concrete way about what the challenges are for us as we attempt to shift our mode of being out of a worldview that has us convinced that separation is real. Even after you see through that myth, the patterns that have been formed by it remain. And it’s tricky. It’s especially so in the heat of the moment. Patterns are hard to disrupt. To do so requires that we catch our snap directly in the heat of the moment. It requires recognizing the pattern as it is happening, then stopping to breathe and give space for some other possibility. And we have to do this over and over and over again until a new pattern has been established.

It would have been helpful if in that moment I had stopped to feel what I was feeling and to give space to understand why I was feeling it. Then I could have communicated that to Shannon and we could have worked through it together in a way that honored all selves involved. There was no right or wrong in giving the umbrella or not. It was really a question of which choice might best support each self involved. Let’s reverse the roles. If I were the stranded professor, I actually would not want somebody to give me something that is precious to them if I wasn’t sure I would be able to return it. I’d choose the inconvenience of my self so that my extended self could continue to experience joy. If, on the other hand, I saw that giving me the item brought the other joy, then I would accept that gift and seek to pass it on. Either of those options is a win-win. Begrudgingly giving is a win for nobody. So my observation for the week is that when in a situation that doesn’t feel nurturing, just stop. Meet yourself where you are at and nurture what is showing up. Do that first. Do that first because if you don’t feel nurtured, you can’t truly pass it on. You can’t extend your umbrella to cover others until you are situated in your own profound safety. Let’s just say… I’m not there yet.