The Accelerator is Stuck!

This afternoon I went into the kitchen at work to toss together the ingredients for the lunch salad that I'd prepared the night before. As I was racing around, I man said something to me that just totally shocked me into consciousness.  He said, "You have no where to be and nothing to do.  Take your time."

Since sometime in late 2000 or early 2001, I've been racing.  In the early years, the dot.com bust had tanked my business, and I was attempting to right it before it sank. I raced. When I failed at that, I started teaching.  To earn a living as an adjunct college instructor requires teaching a lot of classes. That means lots of class preparation, paper grading, test making, and office hours. Up at 4 a.m. most days, my evening classes usually ended at 9 p.m. I raced all day.  Then when I got a consulting job that paid a normal salary, the expectation was that I'd work almost every waking hour to justify the salary.  I raced. I often fell asleep over my computer.

You get the gist.

I've been racing so long, and I think my accelerator has been stuck in overdrive.  When Thomas said to me, "You have no where to be and nothing to do,"  you could have knocked me over with a feather. For years there have always been five other things I should be doing and back-to-back meetings.  But, not now.  Of course, I had no where to be, and nothing I had to do. For a few seconds, I didn't know what to make of that.

When I finally got my head around it, I went into the lunchroom table, and I did something I've rarely done in the last 15 years. First, I breathed.  Then, I sat down, ate my lunch, and chewed my food. I tried to see if I could make my food last for 20 minutes. I had conversations with two interesting new coworkers.  With one, I shared Italian food/cooking stories.  My creativity kicked into gear as I thought about things I haven't cooked for a while, and mentally, I played with variations I might make.  I took a full 40 minutes for lunch.

I've been "loaned" by my employer to work for the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) for 4-1/2 months.  I needed a break from the pace of work I've been keeping for years and from the toxic work environment in which I have found myself, which increasingly seems to be spinning completely out of control. I applied for the opportunity and was accepted.  Tomorrow I will have been there for a week.

There are times when we are very busy, but on each end of most days, there is time to catch my breath and to do paperwork, return email, make calls, and even to do analysis about how to improve campaign performance.  Such a luxury.

Today when Thomas made his life-changing comment to me, I'd been in overdrive for about four hours.  In my "regular" job, that wouldn't have slowed down for another seven or eight hours, and when it did, I'd be looking at a ton of email and prep for the next day.  Today, my four hours of overdrive was followed by delicious sanity...and lunch, of course.

I've read a number of different estimates of how many days it takes to develop a new habit.  Some say 30 days, and others report 21. Some longer, others shorter.  But, I have 4-1/2 months to practice breathing, walking at a normal pace, eating lunch, being creative, talking to coworkers, and just generally enjoying myself at work.  Surely I can form a useful habit in 4-1/2 months that I can take back to my "real job" with me.  That will definitely be my intention, and taking a new habit back to work with me will certainly be a wonderful investment in my life.

Fully in

Once again I find that similar messages surround me wherever I look.  This time the message is about being "fully in" or completely "going for it."  To mark the 200th anniversary of the founding of our church, the Bishop of Washington visited and preached today.  She shared a story of a friend who had an opportunity to be influential at a national level, but to do so was going to require the person to be "fully in."

Her friend was uncomfortable with that because opportunities in her life had just seemed to float by, and the individual could hop on the boat, so to speak, as it was passing if she was interested.  She'd really never needed to fully commit herself to something before.  But this time, she felt it was important enough that she should be fully in.

Three days ago I coached a client who had been fully in during the application process for what would have been a nice promotion.  She didn't get it.  Now, another opportunity has come along.  She is inclined to not get her hopes up again so that if she doesn't get the promotion, her hopes won't be dashed so terribly as they were last month.  Yet, in our conversation, she identified several things she needs to do to be a good candidate that really require her to be fully in.

She is from the Christian tradition and we talked about being "lukewarm water."  The book of Revelation in  the Christian scriptures says, "I know your works, that you are neither cold not hot: I would that you were cold or hot. So then because you are lukewarm, and neither cold not hot, I will spew you out of my mouth." (Revelation 3:15-16.)  By the end of the session, my client really "got" that she couldn't be successful unless she was fully in.

As I walked home after church, I kept playing with this.  Be either hot or cold, but not lukewarm. The problem is, I have nothing that I can really get cranked up about enough to be "hot," and really nothing I am so indifferent to as to be "cold."  There must be something, I thought.

Almost as I had that thought, I knew what I needed to be fully in about: in 1997 I "finished" a book, which I call Choice Point.  I passionately marketed it for several years.  About 50 people have read it, and most feel like it was important and different from anything else in the market.  Repeatedly, the book met with rejections.  One publisher returned it so quickly, that I couldn't believe that enough time had passed for the manuscript to reach the publisher and be returned.

When my business tanked, I was forced to push the book to the back burner.  Out of sight, but definitely not out of mind.  It has been a couple years since I got it out and reread it.  The message is important, but the book is badly dated.  It would require major rework/rewrite.  I simply have no time or energy to do that.

Yet, today I knew the thing that I needed to be fully in about was Choice Point.  I truly have to admit that over the last decade, I couldn't even say that I had even cranked up the temperature on my passion for the book to lukewarm.  Totally cold.  Not fully in.  Not in at all.

I don't know when I will find the time to even read the book again, much less rewrite and update it.  Yet, I know in my heart of hearts, that is what I must do.

My  problem is not feeling fully in about anything.  I believe that, like my coaching client, I have been wounded too many times when I was fully in, and I don't want to pain of disappointment again. Yet, I know, that this book deserves the light of day.

When I think about being fully in, the first thing that comes to my mind is when will I find time?  I work very long hours, but I work those hours because of my commitment to my clients. What, I wonder, if I made my book as important as my clients.  Somehow that feels like a false choice to me because my clients are living breathing humans who are often in pain, and my book is a stack of paper.  But I know that my stack of paper could change lives, and it might even change the world.

Ten days ago, I took samurai training, and one of my take-aways was that I can't take care of others until I take care of myself.  My soul is in Choice Point.  Maybe I can't really take care of my clients until I take care of fully birthing this book into the world.  I am not sure how I will make this happen, but I am confident that if I make a commitment to my intention to do so, it will happen.

Being Flexible with the Universe

As I've written in this blog a number of times before, I love to take a few days at the Jewish New Year to reflect on the past year and to imagine the path before me in the next year. I choose to use this time to set my intentions for the year ahead. The date of the holiday fluctuates, but it is generally between mid-September and early-October.  This year it began at sundown on September 13.

I am not Jewish, but coinciding the timing for such reflection with the holiday makes sense to me, perhaps because I spent so many years, either as a teacher or student, starting a school year in the fall. I love to learn, and the anticipation on new lessons always excited me. Similarly, my reflections inevitably reveal lessons from the year past and point to potential learning in the year ahead.

Or maybe the timing makes sense to me because I am a gardener, and fall marks the conclusion of the harvest and the dropping of seeds into the ground to sprout the following spring. It is always rewarding to consider what I've grown in the past year and to wonder what I will seed in the year ahead.

For whatever reason, taking a few days of silence at this time of year has become essential to my spiritual growth and development for the last 20 years.  You can understand my consternation, then, when I discovered that this year's somewhat early holiday was going to occur during a short trip to Spain that I'd booked some time ago. I was book-ended on the trip with work commitments and a training session, making it difficult to extend my vacation in either direction. What would I do?  Fortunately or otherwise, the pace of activity leading to the trip overcame thoughts of figuring out what I would do.

As it worked out, I was in Barcelona on the 13th.  I love architecture, and there is nowhere that I've been which is more richly endowed with extraordinary edifices as those seeded by Antoni Gaudi about Barcelona.  At about noon on the 13th, as I sat soaking in the light and color, awestruck again as I'd been during an earlier visit in 2012, the date occurred to me.  For someone who loves architecture, there could not have been a more spiritual setting for reflection.  So I sat and reflected.

(For  more images, see: https://www.google.com/search?q=pictures+of+la+sagrada+familia+barcelona&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CDgQ7AlqFQoTCMz83Lif_scCFYVWPgodmpQFtA&biw=864&bih=494#imgrc=5xYv7yXQlAZ4LM%3A)

The funny thing is that when I'd shared my dilemma about not having my meditation retreat with my friend Amy a few weeks earlier, she'd suggested that I find a church wherever I was and meditate. Without conscious intention, that is exactly what had occurred. Over the next 24 hours, I kept bumping into experiences that stimulated reflection, and the day ended with me sitting and reflecting in the Cathedral of Barcelona, the only Gothic cathedral in the city.

Furthermore, during the week I was in Spain, I ran into one situation after another that encouraged me to look inward. (More on some of those in the next few days.) So, my time of reflection was quite different than had been my norm, but by being flexible with the Universe and letting it leading me where I needed to be, I accomplished the intention of my annual retreat in a very different way. (And for my listening and flexibility, the Universe threw in some very good Spanish food and wine as a bonus--have to say that really beat my usual fasting regime.)

Where has compassion gone?

As the image of a dead three-year-old refugee boy, laying face down in the sand at the edge of the surf, gripped the world over the weekend, stories of compassion began to emerge.

Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir, a young woman still living at home with her parents, scoffed at the Iceland government's offer to take in 50 refugees.  She launched a Facebook page, saying a friend had opened his home to several families, and she would pay airfare for five people.  Over the last few days, 11,000 Icelanders have offered to support refugees to resettle in their country, over and above the meager response of their government.

Iceland isn't alone in the paltry government response to the current refugee crisis. Not only are numbers low in many developed countries, including the US and Canada, but the processing time is so glacial that people die for lack of response.  The family of the young boy above, who had relatives in Canada and had attempted to resettle in both Canada and the US, is among them.  The boy, his mother, and brother all died as their inflatable raft deflated while they literally and unsuccessfully hung on for dear life.

On Canadian Broadcasting's Day Six, host Brent Bambury interviewed a middle-aged Vietnamese woman who, as an 11-year-old child traveling alone, was one of the earlier "boat people" that time from Vietnam. She had been sponsored to come to Canada, where she started a new life.  She eventually became a professional, started her own business, and brought other family members, who also started businesses, to Canada.

For several years while I lived in North Carolina another of the Vietnamese boat people manicured my nails.  She and her husband, also a boat person that she met in a refugee "tent city" in Hong Kong, also started a successful business and a family and became active in their community. They frequently hosted fund-raiser for one charitable cause of another.

In my lifetime, I recall the Vietnamese boat crisis and before that Cuban Mariel Boatlift,  who risked their lives to make a run to Florida. Over 600,000 people, many lone children, resettled in the US. My pastor was about the same age as the girl above from Vietnam, when he too made the risky journey to the US.  In 2013, he gave the invocation at President Obama's second inauguration.

Not so many years before I was born, 250,000 refugees were resettled in the US after World War II. Throughout the 19th Century, thousands of Jewish refugees of pogroms in Eastern Europe landed in the US to make a better, safer life for themselves and their families. They, their children, and grandchildren have become a who's who of the entertainment industry and the professions.

Also in the mid-19th Century, droves of Irish fled to the US to escape the "Potato Famine."  In 1947 the city of Boston alone, then a city of 115,000, took in 37,000 immigrants, roughly one-third their population. In the same year, New York with a population of 372,000 took in 53,000 Germans. Even though it is easy to dismiss these surges with idyllic views of the 19th Century, a careful reading of history shows that the influxes were not painless.

As recently as last year, the US attempted to lock out or return thousands of refugees from gang violence in Central America.  El Salvador is now known as the most dangerous country on earth. One of the leading presidential candidates disparages those attempting to come to the US as murders and rapists, rather than showing us a path to our compassionate roots.

Having slept restlessly Saturday night with aching for the thousands fleeing some of the worst monsters ever to walk this earth and our developed world's lack of gumption to do something to help, I entered an UberX vehicle Sunday morning and chatted with my driver, a man I would guess to be in his late 20s.  He had come here from Ethiopia two and a half years ago. He was quick to tell me he was a Christian, signalling that he has probably been the brunt of the anti-Muslim prejudice that predominates this country.  Running his own business, he told me his day begins at 4 a.m. on weekends, starting with people who are going to the airport.  He generally works 14 hours on the weekend days.

As he dropped me at church, he asked that I pray for him. I felt like asking for him to pray for those of us who can't see the richness that comes to our country with industrious and talented immigrants like himself.

While one great-great grandmother was Native American, the rest of my ancestors were immigrants. In fact most of us in the US today are the descendants of immigrants.  Many of their ancestors were in a similar situation to the current refugees, fleeing physical, emotional, cultural, religious, or physical persecution in their homelands.  Yet there seems to be collective amnesia that there were people in this country that may have found the onslaught of their very own ancestors just as potentially unsettling as they do the current wave of refugees.

Every major religion has a belief that is somehow equivalent to the "Golden Rule"--do unto others as we would have them do unto us.  Would we not want compassion if we were in inflatable rafts, risking life and limb to escape barbarians in our homelands?  What has happened to our compassionate roots?

I am troubled about how I can make a difference, even as Pope Francis has called for every Catholic parish to take in a refugee family.  Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir has demonstrated once again what Margaret Mead showed us decades ago: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

My Own Personal Genius

After church yesterday, I came in and flipped on the local NPR station as I often do. I listen as I cook. Radiolab was mid-show when I tuned in, so I don't have a lot of context for what came earlier.  I was, however, absolutely fascinated by two interviews about the creative process.  The first was with a musician, who shall remain nameless because I tuned in mid-interview and can't find it on the web. The other was with best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame.

My fascination was with their separate descriptions of controlling the creative process--what I will describe as managing the muse.  Gilbert described the difference in how we talk about "genius," as something a person is, opposed to what the ancient Greeks did, which was something we have.  Having a genius feels rich, maybe even decadent.  Having a genius at my personal disposal offers limitless possibilities.

Both artists described talking to the muse as something one masters. The musician described being in heavy traffic when a marvelous song just came to him.  He said that he told the muse, or as Gilbert would say the genius, that it was obvious that he was in traffic and couldn't capture the song.  He ordered it to come back when he could write it down, if it was to be his song...and it did.  He literally acted as if the muse was his servant.

Gilbert told similar stories, but I was most interested in the one about the title of her popular Eat, Pray, Love book.  She said throughout the writing and even through editing and proofing she could only come up with a "working title" that she knew wasn't right.  She told of an extensive process of soliciting input from many friends, but she knew that none of them were correct.  It was only when she told her muse to give her a title that she awakened the next morning with Eat, Pray, Love, and instantly knew it was the title for which she'd been waiting.

This grabbed my attention because I have had a compelling relationship with titles of my books, both written and those still incubating. I have often had the inspiration for a book that felt like it wanted to pour out of me right now but inconveniences of daily life, like earning my paycheck, got in the way.  Unlike Gilbert, I most often get the title before I get the book.  Years ago I started a folder on my computer called "Books in the Making," and when I had one of these inspirations, I'd start a new document and write a paragraph or two to jog my memory when I have time to write.

It's not like I have had an excess of writing time in recent years, but on the occasions when I have set aside writing time, reading the files has not recaptured the energy of the inspiration that I'd had earlier.  In fact, if I can remember any of it, what remains is a lukewarm trite topic.  Where was the idea that was so great?

I am truly intrigued by the concept of ordering "my genius" to hold that energy and come back to me when I have time to at least write a chapter or two to warm the groove.  I can promise you that I will do so the next time I have an inspiration.  In the meantime, I expect that I will need to build a little "mastering my genius" muscle to figure out how to make the concept work for me, but doing so is a task that I am up to.  In fact, I am actually looking forward to it.  Do you suppose I can name "my genius?"