Sunday, June 29, 2014

Owning a Piece of the Whole Darned Thing

I took a few minutes by the side of the pool this afternoon to read, and it was lovely. Then came a time when I felt like I wanted to write a blog post.  I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths.  What should I write?  "Look around" was my guidance. 

As I opened my eyes, I found myself gazing at the balcony guard on an apartment of an adjacent tower.  Mine is one of four almost identical towers, which were built in the 1960s. Originally, they were all rentals.  One remains such. Over the years, one was sold off into condominiums (condos,) meaning that each person owns their apartment and pays for use of common spaces.  The one I occupy is a cooperative (coop,) meaning that each of us owns a piece of the whole building.

Two years ago when I was shopping for a place to buy, I noticed that coops seemed to be better managed, which meant that maintenance was planned and budgeted for so that the collective investment was cared for and fees were pretty stable from year to year.  Being able to plan my budget was important to me, so I focused on finding an apartment in a coop building.  Since I've been here, I've noticed that when we all have a vested interest in the condition of the whole building, it seems to be better taken care of, too.

This afternoon when I looked at the condo balcony, it looked pretty shabby, even though it was the same age as the other towers.  The rental was slightly better looking, but not much.  However, the building where we all owned a piece of the whole darned thing definitely looked the most cared for.

I am not writing a real estate column, but what I was observing on our balconies seemed to be a good metaphor for the world.  When we think about our responsibilities as only to those things we "own," that is where our energy and attention are focused.  Is my house cared for? Do I have safe roads and bridges? Is my retirement planned for? Are my children getting a good education? Do I have healthcare? Is my neighborhood safe?

But when we feel ownership of all of our communities, schools, churches, and the world, then we begin caring and planning for the whole darned thing. Even though I have no children, I am concerned about the quality of education that young people in my community and across my country receive.  Even though I take the Metro most places, I am concerned about the number of sub-par bridges and highways that might tumble at any time.  I know that it is not just my retirement that I should be concerned about, but a whole generation of Americans who are living longer than anyone expected and a Social Security system that will run out of money when most of us are in our late 80s or early 90s, even though 25% of the Boomers are expected to live to 100. 

Owning a piece of the whole darned thing isn't just true on a national level, but globally as well.  We should all be concerned that we have clean air and water and about the impacts of climate change, because if we don't, we all suffer, like that shabby balcony that hangs over the pool that all of us use. Unleashing a whole generation of young people in the Middle East who are well educated but can't find jobs, is destined to unleash forces of discontent which will impact all of us.  Yet, many Americans seem to notice little and care less that we are all on this planet Earth together, and, for good or ill, and whether or not we act like that we own a piece of the whole darned thing, we do.

We are all connected.  We cannot stick our heads in the sand and pretend that if we are comfortable in our nice house, educating our children well, and tending our own healthcare and retirements that all will be well. Like it or not we are in this thing together. If all of us don't do well, none of us will in the long run.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Just When I Thought It Wouldn't Happen...

In my last post, "Connection" (6/23/14,) I lamented how focused everyone seems to be on their devices these days and to the impact that has had on diminished human connection. For several days I put my smartphone away as I said I would with the intention to connect, but sadly everyone else seemed glued to their own. Then just two days ago when I thought it wouldn't happen, connection everywhere!

While I am clear that both my intention for find connection and my behavior was different, I made connections with people all Thursday evening.  With my device put away, I engaged in light banter with the cashier with a nose piercing and a beautiful smile at the frozen yogurt shop, and then I walked over to the Square to eat my yogurt and noticed a lot of activity.  There were probably 75-100 people taking a yoga class in the park.  I don't know if that generated the energy, but there were lots of people milling about...with hardly an electronic device in sight.  Someone even asked for directions instead of consulting the iPad tucked under his arm.

The curiosity to me was whether this only happened on yoga class days or if this was a nightly occurrence that I'd been missing as I zipped home (usually much later) under this very park.  I was really astounded at how alive it was.  I plan to leave the office earlier this week and make a point of getting off the Metro to explore. 

I was feeling engaged with people again as I headed to a meeting that I've missed for most of the last year as my days have grown longer and longer and with that I've grown to feel more and more isolated.  There was a spring in my step as I walked the 3-4 blocks to the meeting.  The program was interesting and afterward, I noticed that people lingered and actually talked to each other.  I saw no one focused on his or her electronic device.  An interesting audience of thoughtful individuals, who ranged from 16 to 80, was mixing and sharing questions across almost every artificial demographic barrier. 

Although my work forces me to extravert most of the time, I am a serious introvert.  Usually I would have slipped out the door after the formal part of the meeting, but Thursday I mixed and had several very interesting conversations before walking to the Metro the long way.

That's where the biggest shock of the night occurred.  I sat next to a young man reading a real paper book on the Battle of Midway (WWII.)  I have a long-standing, but casual interest in history, and with the proliferation of WWII stories around the marking of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day Invasion, my normal interest was piqued further.  I said something to him about the book, and we were off.  We had a very robust conversation until my stop arrived way sooner than it usually seems to.

Friday I attended the weekly jazz concert at the Sculpture Garden at the National Museum of Art, where hundreds were interacting over music, dance, food, and beverage, and the most frequent use of devices were for cameras and to find friends in the crowd.  An animated two-year-old with a big white fabric flower in her hair held at least thirty adults around her spellbound as she explored and moved with the rhythms of the music.

I am heartened. People do still engage with each other face to face. At last over the last few days such encounters have scattered themselves generously across my path.  This evening I saw a commercial about the "good old days"--maybe in the 1980s and 90s.  There was a line that people answered more door bells than cell phones back then, and the voice over led to the moment where it said that some people were still able to slip through to those times, when we see a young woman sliding through an invisible wall to join a block party. 

I don't know if all this has been going on around me and I have missed it because I've not been looking or if I managed to slip through to a time when people really connected, but I liked it.  If I slipped through to another dimension, it is my intention to stay.  It seems like a good time.  It is Fourth of July week in the nation's capitol: that's always a gigantic party.  Whoo-hoo! Here I go...

Monday, June 23, 2014

Connection

Our world has been described as "connected."  Certainly a wide range of devices allows us to communicate in real time all over the world.  Yesterday I saw the movie "Chef," in which a tech savvy 10-year-old propels his father's food truck business into national prominence, using a wide variety of applications that I really wish I understood.  Most surely, technology has redefined what it means to be connected.

Yet in the more conventional sense, I wonder if we aren't less connected.  From the Latin, "connect" means to "bind together" or to "be united physically."  However, on Google, seven out of ten definitions of connect come before "to form a relationship or feel an affinity" and "provide or have a link or relationship with (someone or something)."  Earlier definitions have to do with electrons, connecting to utilities, and relating events. 

On a bicycle outing near Georgetown last week, I was struck with the lack of connection that our devices have created.  I saw two coeds walking together, each having conversations with others on their phones.  They may each have had an electronic connection with someone else, but they had lost forever the opportunity to "bind together" with each other in that moment. 

Several others had conversations on their digital devices and missed the beauty of the day, spring flowers blooming, the rush of the creek below, or probably even the cool air wafting up from the creek to refresh and slightly chill the hot summer day.  Lost forever were those opportunities to connect with nature, some would even say God, in that moment. 

For someone who hasn't had a significant other in her life for over 20 years, tears came to my eyes at the young bride who ignored her new husband while chattering about meaningless trivia during a phone conversation with someone else while he forlornly looked on.  What a lost moment that will never occur again. 

I have been spent time with people who kept texting others.  That sure tells me how important our time together is to them.

During the eight years that I have lived in Washington and used the Metro daily, I have noticed a change in connection between strangers.  When I first came, strangers actually talked and shared the ups and downs of their days with each other. I learned about things going on in the city and even got a lead for a potential job from someone I didn't know moments before. Synchronicities could actually happen. While I do still occasionally see people who get on the train together and continue to talk, more often I see people on their devices and in their own worlds.  Even walking down the street, people have their ear buds in listening to music or podcasts or are talking or texting, oblivious to what is going on around them. 

I've said before that I believe God is in that space that connects us one to another--what "binds us together," as it were.   I cannot help but wonder if we aren't cutting ourselves off from God and each other when we choose electronics over true connection with a loved one, friend, or even a stranger, who is actually present with us. 

A few months ago, I posed the possibility of living each day as if it were our last in a blog post. (11/28/13 and 3/15/14) I think that question might well be extended to our "connections."  While I am certain that if this were my last day, there are some people that I'd want to "reach out and touch" digitally, I also know that if I'd been that young bride mindlessly talking about the weather and where she'd been shopping, instead of looking into the eyes of my her husband, I would have chosen differently.

One definition of an addiction is when we use an activity--drinking alcohol, taking drugs, overeating., sex, work...or using electronics--to keep us from connecting with those around us.  While I love my devices as much as the next person, I think the use of our devices all boils down to the intention we bring to our connections.  Is my intention to bind me together with God and people around me?  Is my intention to use my device to connect or am I using it to keep me from connecting?

Last winter I introduced the Grocery Store Game (12/1/13) as a way to connect with people around us, and it does work.  However, making connection is much harder when the people around us have their ears blocked off or their eyes and brains engaged in other activity.  I am not quite sure how to start the connections again, but I am pretty certain that if I take out my ear buds and put my device in my pocket, I will be closer to having an answer. So I did that today.  I can't say that I made any great connections, but I know that I am closer than when I am plugged in and tuned out to my immediate world.


Sunday, June 22, 2014

Lazy, Hazy Days of Summer?

Summer is officially here.  Yesterday was our longest day.  Two days in the last week the heat index flirted with 100 degrees before dropping back to a high in the low 70s yesterday.  I have been staycationing, and I've loved moving at a slower pace.  One day I took a bicycle trip to another town with a friend.  It felt good to move.  I've walked a lot, got some dancing in, and completed my once-a-year read of a novel.  (Fanny Flagg's The All-Girl Filling Station Reunion. It was great fun.) I even spontaneously dropped everything to take in a movie matinee.

Summer reading lists speak to an assumption that in summer we have more time to read.  Maybe there is even the assumption that we have more time.  There is a logic there that seems to follow a natural order of things.  It is too hot to do much other than read or at least in the middle of the day.  When I was young, we did chores in the early morning hours when it was cooler, so that we could be lazier during the hotter part of the day.  When I was doing distance running in my thirties, I would use the other end of the day, planning my long runs to start at the end of the day when the sun had dropped below the horizon and cooler air began to waft in its wake. 

Yet, in reality, except for a vacation week like this last one, the pace of life seems not to  have slowed during the summer for years, certainly since adulthood.  I will work the same long hours next week in the official summer as I did during the long dark days of winter.  A colleague has already texted me before noon on Sunday about work we will do together tomorrow.  A few summers ago a consulting gig had me literally working every waking hour of the summer, often falling asleep on my computer with exhaustion. With the exception of school teachers who are out for the summer, but they are often taking classes and making lesson plans for next school year, is there really anyone for whom summer is lazier?

Sadly, I even note that for children in this area that summer isn't even lazier, just different.  Most of my friends who have children began orchestrating summer activities in the winter and early spring so that a sequence of camps keeps their kids engaged in productive learning experiences all summer.  While I fully understand the need of working parents to have their children engaged in safe activities, I am kind of sad for the kids that they don't have the freedom to explore and create the non-structured fun that marked summers during my childhood.

This last week has been renewing for me.  I've slept better.  I feel better physically from having moved more.  The fiction reading has stimulated my creativity.  My dreams have been more active.  I've certainly felt more in synch with my body's own rhythms.  I noticed when I was tired, and twice I laid down and took an afternoon nap.  (I cannot imagine why it is that kids resist taking naps.) Yet I know that the time has been way too short to really make an impact.  A few hours into my day tomorrow, my down time will seem a distant memory.

Nature has a lot to teach us.  In the fall seeds drop from flowers, fruits, and vegetables.  They embed themselves in the soil, and they rest for months.  The harder casings of the seeds soften as they rot away over the months and make it easier for new life to spring forth.  As days get longer and warmer in the spring, new life springs forth and a season of rapid growth and productivity follows.  Even in biblical times, it was understood that a time for soil to lay fallow was important, a practice that has been born out scientifically.

Why then do we think that we as human beings could not benefit from lazier days in summer?  I remember reading somewhere a few years ago that until the Industrial Revolution the average person worked two hours a day.  There were some very long days at times of planting, harvest, or the hunt, but there were also lazy days by the spring fishing and winter days by the hearth.  I don't want to suggest that those were idyllic times, because I understand that there were harsher realities of those days. However, we seem to be hard-wired to have more down time that we allow ourselves these days.

I can only wonder what it would be like if we all had extended down time to nourish our creativity in the summer, as some European countries do.  Would we be able to find common ground from contentiousness if we had down time to ponder the benefits?  Would we discover easier, better, or more creative ways to work if we relaxed our minds from what is and allowed reflection on what might be? Would we be more compassionate with our co-workers if we didn't feel stretched to our limits all the time?  Would we suffer from fewer stress-related illnesses?  Would we feel better if we had less news being piped to us 24 x 7?

Sadly, I can't see a mass movement for a summer downtime emerging, but I think there would be significant benefit to collective lazy, hazy days of summer.

Friday, June 20, 2014

Beauty Many Places

Twenty years ago when I first left Oregon to move to North Carolina, the first thing my friends would ask on my monthly business trips back to the West Coast was "When are you moving back?"  I'd laugh, and, to their incredulity, I'd say "Never." They just couldn't imagine I could move from such a beautiful place as Oregon. There certainly were many beautiful places in Oregon. AND...North Carolina also had many beautiful spots.

When I left the Midwest for Oregon in my twenties, friends there also questioned my sanity when I left "God's Country," the name many Hoosiers call Indiana. There were many beautiful places in Indiana and Ohio, where I'd lived during two college years.

I've driven across the United States several times and on each trip I've discovered beauty in almost every state. In trips abroad I've found beauty in many spots there as well. Despite what my friends in Indiana might believe, if God created special places of beauty, he/she was most generous with them.

I am writing most of this post in Wilmington, Delaware, where I've just spent a lovely day. The gem in the crown of this city is certainly the riverfront, and as I think of beautiful places I've visited, they've often had focal points of water.

Wilmington's Riverfront includes several aspects of others in one setting. It is beautifully landscaped along a wide brick and concrete path, which is actively used by runners, walkers, and cyclists. Yesterday I took the water taxi from one end of the city to the other and back again. Like San Antonio, Wilmington's riverfront hosts several restaurants which were packed and bubbled forth with music and laughter...and cheers for World Cup goals from one. Crewers rowed their skulls along the river.

Wilmington also hosts some bits of human history. Harriett Tubman had led over 700 slaves to freedom using her Underground Railroad which ended in Wilmington.  During World War II, Wilmington fostered freedom in a different way: it was the largest producer of US Navy ships in the country.  What had once been shipyards now hosts the Riverfront path I have walked several times since arriving.

One of the unique characteristics here, though is the "urban wildlife preserve." Behind meticulously tended landscapes are wilder sanctuaries throughout, culminating in several hundred acres of preserved marshland at the end of development.

As I've reflected on this and lots of other places of beauty, I started to use the word "extraordinary," but "extraordinary" implies out of the ordinary.  Beautiful places so abound in our world that they are not out of the ordinary. Perhaps that is a problem. We've become so accustomed to the beauty around us that it has become ordinary, when it should quite rightly be remarkable. The brooks and streams, wild flowers, trees, and every other creation ought to take our breath away...daily, even hourly.  Sadly, most of the time it passes unnoticed.

If we would just notice what is working, we might also notice people cooperating and collaborating.  Ever notice when someone is attempting to open a door with their hands full (and sometimes when they aren't) that another person often opens the door.  Or, ask for directions in a public place, and several people within earshot will add pieces.  Comedian Jon Stewart once described that we know how to cooperate by explaining that cars making their way onto a freeway alternate methodically without direction.  The way that we cooperate and collaborate is a thing of beauty, which we seem to ignore until it stops working.

I've written about gratitude many times in this blog, but today I am wondering what it would be like if we all noticed both the natural beauty around us and the generally cooperative spirit of humanity.  Maybe that is where the gratitude journaling helps: it forces us to sit and remember things of beauty--natural and human--around us.  But, I think real magic might happen if we focused our intention on noticing beauty in the moment...oh, what a beautiful world it could be.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Free us from lack of vision...

This morning in church, we were reciting prayers that we always recite.  At least, I think we always recite them.  For the first time I wondered: do they change these periodically?  I really don't remember that line before.  The line?  "Free us from lack of vision, and from inertia of will and spirit...."

Back in the day when I used to speak more, I would often write a speech before I left home.  Then, I'd rewrite it, often till it was a different speech, on the plane and in airports.  Finally, I'd rewrite it again the night before in my hotel room...until it was a different speech.  At last the moment to delivery my remarks would arrive, and I would delivery a whole different speech than any of the ones I'd written or rewritten.  I felt like God would give me the words that people in the audience needed to hear in that moment, but I was never confident enough to prepare no remarks. The ritual repeated itself over and again.  I created a file labeled, "Speeches I never gave," for the ones that I had written but...well, you get the idea.

After the speeches, I always believed that everyone in the audience heard a different message--the message that each person needed to hear that moment.  Kind of the reverse of speaking in tongues: I said the same words but in transport to the ears of my audience, they transformed into a special message.

This morning as I heard, "Free us from lack of vision...," I wondered if that is what had happened to me.  Had these words been here each week, and I had just never been ready to hear them?  And, this week I was somehow different; now I was ready to hear that I had a lack of vision and inertia of will and spirit?  I don't really know if the words actually changed or if I was just finally ready to hear them, but it doesn't matter.  I am ready to hear them, so the timing is perfect either way. 

I am starting a Staycation today.  That's were I take a week of vacation and stay at home and enjoy activities that tourists, who travel from all over the world to visit Washington, do.  I save money, and more important, I actually return to work next week rested and relaxed.  I also get to enjoy my home, which I spend a lot of money on buying each month, but spend very little time appreciating.

I've been working long hours approaching this Staycation, and I haven't really had much time to think about what I'd do.  I had considered some special art exhibits, but I've already seen most of the ones in which I had an interest.  Three different venues, including the National Mall, show movies outside.  I don't usually get to go to them because of my 5:20 wake-up time, but when I checked what was showing, none of them interested me. I invited neighbors for dinner, but they haven't responded. I have contemplated a day trip to a small city not far away that I've never visited.

However, this morning those words "Free us from lack of vision" stung me.  My limited Staycation planning has lacked vision.  I recalled a month-long pilgrimage to Greece in 1998 and 16 days in Tuscany in 2009.  In each case I only had reservations in and out of the country, and I listened to my heart and where it wanted to go each day.  Neither demonstrated inertia of will and spirit.  What if I listened to each day this week?

Listening to our inner knowing, our spirits, or God whispering in our ears takes a great deal more vision, will and spirit than thoughtful planning.  I have found that it also brings greater rewards, even if more courage. 

There is an old quote, which I believe came from Marianne Williamson that when we turn over our lives to God, the first thing we hear is "Thank you," and the second thing we hear is, "Hold on!"  Well, I am turning my Staycation over to God, so I am holding on.  Except for dancing tonight and a tentative bicycle trip, scheduled with a friend, I don't know what I will do this week, but I am certain that it will reflect more will and spirit than it would have if I started a day earlier. 

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

The Real Cost of Things

During the last week, countless stories have flooded the media, relating tales of heroism during the D-Day invasion of Normandy by the Allied Troops in World War II.  The dwindling veterans of the invasion grow smaller each year as their ages increase.  Now the teenage boys that made their way onto the French beaches approach 90, and their remaining older compatriots are well into their 90s. 

Last weekend I heard one of these nonagenarians sharing brave stories of his role as part of the lead party, conducting reconnaissance for the massive invasion, as they dodge bullets and stepped over bodies of their friends.  Another--a medic--told of stealing bandages from the dead warriors because they were the only ones remaining after the boat with medical supplies had been sunk.

One of these men related, "My wife says I've never been the same."  The words cut through me like a cold kitchen knife. 

My father was among the brave men who invaded Normandy 70 years ago this week.  I don't know what he was like before the war, but I am pretty confident that he as never the same either. 

There has never been a doubt in my mind that my father loved me totally and completely.  He was the only dad that took off work from his blue-collar job to come to special events at school.  He was there to cheer my every endeavor.  He convinced me I could be anything I wanted to be, even though I was too young to be the first woman on the Supreme Court.  Yet, just as surely as I know he loved me, I also know that there was always a distance.

My father left his heart on the beaches of Normandy, at the liberation of Paris, or  on other battlefields, just as I suspect had happened with the man in the news report on the radio.  The pain, fear, loss, anguish, or anger of the battle were too intense to deal with, so he tucked his heart away.  I doubt that it ever came out again.  He substituted other things, like attending school events on a weekday, for emotion to communicate love. 

In my mid-thirties when my husband had left me to run off with his work colleague, and I was a heap of emotion, my father was clearly distressed, but he just didn't know what to say or do.  He asked if I needed money.  I think that was the adult equivalent of attending school events on a weekday.

I don't think that we ever calculate the cost of war, and maybe that is a good thing.  It was important to stop the Nazis in World War II, and if we had really considered the costs, maybe we wouldn't have jumped in.  Most of a generation of men divorced themselves of emotion.  The man I adopted as a dad after my own father died told me of still being haunted by the war well into his 80s.  Many of them were never able to be emotionally available to their children, who became a generation to play with sex and drugs to experience a substitute feeling.

It wasn't just emotions that didn't come home.  Some left limbs on the battlefield.  A man at our church was so badly scarred from a wartime explosion that it was hard to tell what he looked like.  In whispers people said he used to be very handsome. 

But World War II wasn't our most costly war. During the Civil War, 620,000 people died.  Many more lost limbs, hearing and sight. 

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is the new name for what was called shell shock in World War I.  Men, who for the first time were victims of modern warfare, had no way to have prepared for that horror.  My grandfather spent 25 years in a mental institution from his war's PTSD. 

The most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen men and women, who probably would have died in an earlier time, come home without limbs...or the dreaded PTSD or traumatic head injuries from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs.) Had we really calculated these costs, would we not have been able to predict the impact on our Veterans Administration health system. 

War takes other tolls, too.  Whole generations of young men die. Beautiful masterpieces of architecture lie in rubble.  Looters take off with museum pieces that have been cared for lovingly for millennia.  Perhaps a collective amnesia cripples our thinking as we contemplate war. 

There are a lot of things that we don't calculate the real cost of.  War is just one of them.  Do people carrying an extra 30 pounds really calculate the costs of those extra pounds, in both years lost and additional medical costs incurred?  Do people who get that bargain shirt for $10 at Wal-Mart calculate the real cost of that garment? Do those who smoke a pack a day realize the costs of their habits? Do people who choose factory-farmed beef for dinner realize the cost to our environment?

It seems to me that the real cost of things is rarely reflected on the price tag.  If it were, we would probably all choose to spend differently for things so dear.


Sunday, June 8, 2014

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

For most of the last 51 months, my supervisor has made my life extremely difficult.  To say that at times it has been hell is not an exaggeration. It's not just me.  She seems to be an almost-equal opportunity difficult task master.  Over that time, I've watched myself go from being a strong, confident, and creative professional to a shrinking violet who has learned to stay under the radar.  I've lost my humor and my optimism.  By showing up as less than who I really am, I have lost some of my integrity.

Why do I tell you all that?  I think it is important for you to understand that relationship before I share what I am about to tell you.

Last Wednesday I said something to my boss in front of others. It was true, and I am sure it was hurtful.  As the hours passed, with each I felt more and more guilt and shame.  By evening, I had a long talk with myself about who I was and who I wanted to me.  The short answer: not like that. 

The first thing Thursday morning, I sought out my supervisor, and I apologized.  I said I knew what I'd said had been hurtful, and I was very sorry.  She accepted my apology with grace.  Later in the day she thanked me, and I again said how sorry I had been.

Nothing she had done over the last four years justified my being unkind. My unkindness is about me, not about her. In fact, I think that my ability to not respond in kind in the face of her words and actions has been the mark of the person I choose to be.  When I started responding in kind, that is when I lost my ability to be who I choose to be.

What is interesting is what happened at that second meeting: we had what was probably the best conversation we've ever had.  Instead of continuing to shrink, my apology had given me the standing to be fully present in our meeting. I shared some things that had been on my heart for a long time.  I told her how limiting my job has become. She listened.

I am not sure what forgiveness means in this context.  I have certainly not forgotten all the injustices I've suffered at her hand.  However, I am tired of this relationship as it has been.  In fact, I am tired.  The environment in which my team works is exhausting, and work that used to exhilarate me now leaves me drained.  I am also tired of leaving my stuff at home every day.  Dumbing down doesn't suit me, and it is totally out of character and integrity.  In this situation, I think that forgiveness means clearing the air so that I may fully show up again.

Some would say she doesn't deserve it.  In retrospect, I don't think I did it for her.  I did it for me.  I offered her an olive branch because I didn't like that I was becoming like her.  I didn't like that I was showing up out of character and integrity.  Since my Thursday afternoon meeting, I have recalled a quote, "Forgiveness is the gift you give yourself."  I don't know who the original source is, but I've seen it work time and again with clients.  This week I saw it work for me.

Perhaps what forgiveness does for us is remind us that we've all done something at some time that we were not proud of.  My sharpness with my boss on Wednesday morning was a knife in me, reminding me of who I was becoming, and I didn't like it. By recognizing that my own imperfections, I was humbled to accept her own.   It has been a tortuous route to a level playing field, but I hope we have finally arrived.