Day Sixteen: When I Grow Up

Day Sixteen: When I Grow Up

When I grow up, I’d like to be more fun. I think I take myself too seriously most of the time. I’ve spent so much of my life focused on growing up that I’m not sure what grown up is meant to look like. I’d really like to be good at playing. 

I’d like to be the life of the party and live in the house that everyone is always drawn to for game night and holidays. I’d like to be kind and wise and help people feel at home, at peace, comfortable. To help them find rest when bodies and minds and weary. When I grow up, I’d like to be able to be generous whenever I feel like it, with my money, time and resources. I’d like to be certain I’m living in a good direction, that my actions are pointing to a hopeful kind of destination.

But mostly, when I think about the future and growing up, I think about what it would be like to not carry all the responsibility. I grew up in the opposite direction and now I’m trying to grow down. 

I learned way too young that eventually we are all responsible for ourselves in every sense – from self-love to finance to decision-making. In every sense, once you grow up the kind of human you are is determined largely by your own response to whatever circumstance you find yourself in. I started living in that enormous responsibility when I was very young. Despite the reality that I’m still prone to irresponsibility from time to time. But I live into my irresponsibility without a failsafe, a backstop, a safety net. 

Don’t get me wrong – I didn’t grow up entirely and it wasn’t a terrible thing to take responsibility for myself from such a young age. It took me a while to work out things like finances and how to love myself. But what I find myself trying to grow down into is how to be slightly less independent in that responsibility. 

At the end of the day, I often find myself incapacitated for decision-making because I’m exhausted by all the decisions I make each day. Decisions for clients, decisions for myself. What to eat, wear, spend money on. I’m still procrastinating on booking a flight next week because I haven’t decided in which direction to head. Because every single decision is up to me. 

That’s just a touch too much independence for my liking. I think we’re better when we are always learning to compromise for the sake of someone else. It’s also lonely to be making all these decisions all the time. But I’ve not known any other way of being since I was 8 years old. I don’t ever remember a time that I wasn’t worried about managing other people’s expectations or demands of me. 

I’d like a second run at being a kid when I grow up. A chance to trust others to take care of me for a while, to give in to tantrums and whims. To play freely without a shadow of tomorrow’s decisions weighing on me. 

In My Opinion, With Love

In My Opinion, With Love

My whole life, I have thrived in front of an audience. I am a communicator. I have delivered my best work in front of a microphone, in front of an audience and on the published page.

Ask me to write or speak to a room of thousands and I cannot hide the sparkle in my eye. But there is truth in what a wise person once told me – that we craft the skills to communicate well long before we have anything to say. So I spent the last twenty years learning how to say it.

And now I think I have something to say, at last. Several somethings, actually.

Early in life I was labelled a ‘bossy girl’. My mother tells the story of a family friend dragging me home from a playdate exclaiming ‘I will not be told what to do by a five year old!’.

For most of my teens and twenties, I made a reputation for myself as opinionated. I wanted to change the way people think (still do) and therefore think and live differently. The world has a way of disqualifying the young from being able to lead thought revolution. I think it has to do with the idea you have to earn your stripes and pay your dues, both of which really just mean ‘do the time’. Actually I knew who I wanted to be – a person of insight and wisdom and I was practicing my voice, learning how to say what I thought. 

Experience ≠ Wisdom

Experience and the sheer passing of time may lead to observational wisdom, the accrual of shared wisdom, but wisdom and insight stands alone. I set out at a young age, inspired by the ancient thinker Solomon, to pursue wisdom. The ability to perceive and understand situations differently. Thinking differently will always lead to living differently.

Being opinionated has led me to broken-ish relationships, getting fired and lots of meetings where I was expected to apologise. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I did not.

My strength has also been one of my greatest insecurities – a fear that if I speak my mind or say the ‘wrong’ thing, I will inevitably push people away or lose those I love. It has terrible implications for my most precious interpersonal relationships when I want to be vulnerable.

But it has also led me to the greatest learning of my life and some of my very best ‘being’.

Being a person who can tell the truth in love when no one wants to hear it. One who sticks it out on the side of the miserable. The one who tackles tough subjects, suggests alternative perspectives and facilitates conversation, not just lectures. And occasionally still the one who digs her heels in to get her way. I have learned when not to say I told you so and when to say it with grace.

The toughness of it – the sheer bloody hard work of  this ‘think differently’ life has taught me to be a better communicator, a better writer and a better thinker. You have to learn over and over again how to say what you think and how to think better and better.*

A good friend of mine recently offered some words of encouragement, in her blunt and direct way. “You’re a bit of a powerhouse of opinion. You have insight.”

She also reassured me that giving thoughtful opinion and insight delivered with love isn’t the same as the bossy, stroppy twenty-something girl I fear being known as.

There’s no need to worry so much about whether my opinion or insight is right or wrong, or whether it’s ready to be said. I need to trust my gut more often and listen to my body. Perhaps it is more important that I say it in such a way, my love is unmistakable regardless of whether I’m talking to my friends, my readers or my clients.

In my opinion, with love. 

*I am incredibly blessed to have worked with some of the best thinkers I’ve encountered, who have taught me to refine and practice the art of thinking in a variety of contexts. I’m forever grateful and will continue to learn and practice. 

How You Recognise The Life You’re Meant To Live.

How You Recognise The Life You’re Meant To Live.

‘Oh man, you’re brave,’ she said. 

I didn’t feel very brave. I’d just confessed that I hadn’t done the job I was meant to do and more importantly, why I hadn’t done it. I thought it was morally wrong as well as a waste of time. So I hadn’t done what I’d been asked to do and now I was paying the price for pretending. But I have always been brave in the art of honesty and confessing.

‘Brave would have been saying no and what I thought in the beginning, I think,’ I replied ‘instead of pretending like I was sometime going to get around to it.’

‘Maybe. But it doesn’t change how brave you were in the last five minutes. You just faced it head on. I couldn’t do that, whether I was in the right or the wrong.’ 

Maybe it was that I thought I had nothing left to lose but she was right, I was brave. I am brave.

Brave is not all of me, but it is a significant part. And when she said it, I recognised myself in a dozen different instances from age 4 to 19 years old. The brave girl who has learned to say what she thinks. 

If your True Self is a muscle that flexes at a mere trigger, you feel the energy that displaces as soon as that muscle engages. Recognition. You recognise yourself in the moments you think and act out of your Truest nature. Our most True Self is the one who emerges when we are free to form our own shape instead of pushing ourselves into other shaped boxes.

Important side note: there is a difference between what feels familiar and what we recognise. We are drawn to the familiar because it feels known, we see patterns we know and out of habit, we understand how to respond and operate within that system or construct. Often these patterns of familiarity draw us back towards what has been, rather than what might be. 

Recognition is as precise and distinct as a puzzle piece, with only one place that precise shape and colour way can fit. A distinct and necessary part of the puzzle that is you. Your life is the same – the tasks and situations that my hands were made for, where my voice has the most resonance, where my words make sense.

rec·og·ni·tion
ˌrekəɡˈniSH(ə)n/
noun
  • the action or process of recognising or being recognised, in particular.
    synonyms: identification, recollection, remembrance
  • identification of a thing or person from previous encounters or knowledge.
  • acknowledgment of something’s existence, validity, or legality.
    synonyms: acknowledgement, acceptance, admission
Lately, I’ve been recognising myself again. In moments of a little freedom or when back in wide open spaces – the brave, courageous girl comes rushing back out. I have to be brave again, because being my brave self is key to getting back on the path to my life.

The girl who wants to change the world. She is fully connected to her wisdom and knows that her voice resonates and travels on the wind to the far corners of the earth. She feels the permission of the universe to be Other and her otherness is empowering. She feels engaged to her sensual, epicurean self. She has been leaning into her True Self wherever she recognises her and remarkably, it feels like the world is leaning in towards her too. 

I’ve gone on a journey the last few years of trying to follow a script that isn’t my own. Granted, I’ve followed it in my own weird way but here I am, with a list of lessons and skills I’ve learned and an aching heart to get back to being myself.

The Brave within me is relentlessly hammering at the cage of my skeleton, the muscles flexing to make themselves known.. there is more. Not more success or more fame, more fortune (in fact, that is the least likely outcome) but more of ME. There is more of myself waiting to come out and be useful, meaningful and beautiful in the world.

Perhaps it was Mother Superior in The Sound of Music who said it best: ‘You have to live the life you were born to live.’

So I’m listening to myself, recognising the Brave and letting her be, Myself. True Self. Steve Jobs once said ‘Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.’ I think Steve was right. I know who I want to become and I have some ideas about the how and what and the why.

Embracing again, a truth I have always known and recognised a dozen times as it has come to me – I’ll make my own way through this world, not bound to follow a path or a script written by anyone else.

That’s how you know you’re recognising it – because your instinct is to lean into the spaces your True Self fills. And the more of your True Self you lean into, the more of your False Self you fall out of. 

That is the life I recognise. The one my heart and intuition knows. Once you begin to recognise yourself and give voice and space to that person, you begin to recognise your life. It happens all at once; a collusion of what is happening within us and around us and all we have to do is pay attention to what we recognise.

My body knows. There are some people I am naturally drawn towards. It’s easy to share affection or to want to be close. There are others I don’t want to touch me at all. My body knows who belongs and who doesn’t and I let my body tell me, all the time. I follow her instincts and she does not let me down.

My heart knows what matters most and if I’m not paying attention, it will bang away inside my heart cage of rib & lung until I listen and spend some time there.

My spirit and soul know when I am my True Self and when I am not. They war against me when I stay too long inside a box that’s not for me. They stretch out for the open spaces constantly. They have been warriors within me and for me these last few years as I have been learning. Now they are clamouring and dragging my attention back to the path.

The body knows. The heart knows. The spirit and the soul knows. Recognition has us instinctively leaning in. Our self whispers ‘more of that, more of that, more of that’.

You recognise your life sometimes before you know you have it; reaching effortlessly for the pieces that belong. The places and the people who fit just so into your puzzle pieces and before you can blink, you are living and fully alive.

That’s how you know you’re recognising it – because your instinct is to lean into the spaces your True Self fills. And the more of your True Self you lean into, the more of your False Self you fall out of.

I have recognised fragments of my life a dozen times over. Places, moments and people who have fit into the puzzle, tasks that have been my truest self, lessons that have refined me not restrained me. I hold on to them, I’ve let them become anchors because I know they fit. I haven’t always known how and I don’t pretend to now. But I know they belong.. I recognise my life when I see it.

There are times I’ve mistaken familiarity for recognition.. but those things have just been a shadow, a watercolour of my true life. I’ve quickly learned to let them go but not without pain. It’s the dream we chase because we know we need to chase it, even though the first, third and fifth attempts might fail. We persevere and strive towards the life we recognise, the one we are writing for ourselves.

So here is the lesson, here is the big Brave of this next step in the journey. Recognising my true life and when I see it, leaning into it. 

(the opening image credit belongs to David Hayward, whose art has been a constant companion and source of wisdom in my journey)

Anticipation Sickness.

Anticipation Sickness.

“But what if, this time?”, the question echoes in my mind.

The silence in response is the same echoing kind.

I can ask the same question in half a dozen repetitive ways. “Why not, this time, this love, this job, this circumstance?”

I’ve given up on trying to get the question right because I’ve figured out it’s the wrong question to get an answer for. I’m beginning to accept the Universe doesn’t need for me to understand why not, at least not yet. And the day may never come, as so many of us who live with unanswered questions know. If there was an answer to be understood or learned for why my ‘What-Ifs’ have not become ‘What-Is’, I would have found it by now.

I’m not mad about it, just sad about it. It’s Anticipation Sickness, the same illness the ancient prophets and poets wrote of. Hope deferred makes the heart sick but unavoidably, Hope rises and the question, this time just a whisper, echoes again.

“What if, this time?”

An Optimistic Idealist.
We are our own worst enemies at times. A consumption generation collecting toys and experiences, living in a near-constant state of ‘What-Next?’ I, a Futurist and optimistic idealist, am guilty of living always with one eye on the future. It means hope and anticipation of What-Next is constantly simmering away within me, because I wonder if each step is taking me closer to this time, being the exact time my dreams fall within my grasp.

There is a lot of terrible, unhelpful advice available on the subject of dreams.

You have to be bold and grab hold of them. 
You have to be patient and let them go. 
You have to make them happen for yourself. 
Network with people and influencers who will help you. 
You need pray harder/meditate more / visualise more.
Do everything you can do and then do more. 
If it’s meant to be, it will happen. 
When you stop trying, that’s when it will happen. 
Just relax and let it be. 
Just accept yourself / your circumstance and then you’ll find peace. 

I have done all of these things – bought plane tickets and chased my dreams halfway around the world. I’ve done it over and over again. I’ve let it go and let it go again, burning candles and memorabilia. Not just one dream, but several of them. But I’m still left sitting with the question and with that unbearable feeling of Anticipation Sickness welling up within me.

What if, this time? What if I’ve finally learned the lesson that would make me ready, climbed the obstacle that kept me stuck or I’ve become good enough or strong enough or pretty enough. Maybe, finally this mysterious timing and God’s good will has finally caught up with me.

Hope is not a joyful feeling – hope is the gut-wrenching, white-knuckled sigh of the heartbroken, brave and vulnerable to look up, to say ‘Okay, let’s go again.’

A friend said sometimes we are presented with our hope over and over again because in our despair, loss and heartbreak, we learn something we needed to know. She’s right and yes, I have learned deep and good lesson from the heartbreak of hope lost. I know there is truth in that statement but I struggle to accept it as the entire truth – because it doesn’t ring true with my experience. Sometimes all I have learned in the losing is to persevere. But how many times do you need to learn that lesson, before it turns bitter? Surely the Universe has gentler, kinder and more creative ways to teach us that destroying us over and over?

Still, we teach resilience and embrace courage to be vulnerable and to try again, despite our heart-pounding and questions. I am facing my own heart-pounding What-If questions again. Hope comes racing back to the surface and emerges in my late-night sub-conscious, as if the day-dreams weren’t unmanageable enough.

This combination of hope and anxiety can be crippling. And that’s anticipation sickness. Knowing the risk you take to hope at all, knowing what losing hope will feel like, how our way of seeing the world will be again challenged. It’s the fear and anxiety that overshadows joy. Hope is not a joyful feeling – hope is the gut-wrenching, white-knuckled sigh of the heartbroken, brave and vulnerable to look up, to say ‘Okay, let’s go again.’

It’s anxiety in disguise, the kind only known by those who have experienced loss and disappointment. If you have lost hope and yet hoped again, you know what anticipation sickness is. You know the dread feeling of all you might lose again. So it’s hope and heartache all over again and the world clamours at us, with bad advice and little empathy.

It’s lonely, because everyday hopeful circumstances for everyone else , are not that simple or black-and-white for us. 

Montaigne sings “Heartbreak / Feels like an old dream / Feels like a demon / I cannot shake him / I’m not afraid to fall / I am still standing here after all / I didn’t die / That’s my consolation prize / I am alive / That’s my consolation prize.”

At times in my life, I have found myself unable to live in my current reality because it felt hollow and empty in comparison to the dream. But the dream is just a possibility. No matter how I reach for it, I cannot touch it or make it a real thing. No matter how I have tried. In my darkest moments, life has felt like a consolation prize, a next-best-option while I wait for the real thing.

Ask A Better Question.
Replace ‘what if?’ with ‘what now?’ and you’ll find a pathway to living in What-Is, the Present.

‘Whatever you have in your hands, that’s your responsibility.’
Nothing more, nothing less. What you have in your hands is now. You cannot hold the past, you only carry the lessons with you today. You cannot hold tomorrow either. What you have is ‘now’. And that is all you need, it’s all you actually have capacity for. Just today. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s what is in your hands.

What-Is stands exacting when What-If is hard to define. My heart, sick yes, with hope deferred and endless wondering of “what if?”, is not so inclined to trust. My disappointed heart is coaxed back to trust again by the experience of the present. I fiercely drag myself back to that brightly-lit day. What now, today?

How To Move Forward
The best strategy is just a plan, with a little understanding behind it. I’ve learned a strategy for being present today while moving towards the future is to break everything down into the tiniest steps. Most dreams will take months, years, even decades to eventuate. So when living day to day, it’s easy to feel dejected and that you’re not moving forward at all. But you can take a tiny step in a day. Today, you can do one thing to move you closer to where you want to be. A piece of research, downloading an application form, reaching out to the one you’ve been waiting to hear from. Making the call you don’t want to make. 

The Creative Spirit does not jest with us, not once, and understands the fragile human heart. The Universe does not crush our hopes nor tease us without mercy, nor hide themselves from us. We just go looking in the wrong place for God in the future, when God is present in the Now, in the What Is. Present is the only place to find peace in the wake of Anticipation Sickness caused by what we hope for, what we long for, what may yet be.

What-Is is I Am, I Was, is Ever Will Be
What-Is the moment and the day, present
pressing us closer to the Light revealing masterwork 
still barely seen, the ripples in each day
but at a distance of some What-Was,
the vast, expansive movement of Love is bright.

What-Now becomes again joyful, no consolation prize.

 

 

Speaking – The Beatitudes Series, Edge Kingsland.

Speaking – The Beatitudes Series, Edge Kingsland.

Here’s some audio from my recent message at Edge Kingsland, in Auckland NZ on October 16th, 2016.

I’ve included some slides that I used, that may be helpful visual aids. Listen to the end and you’ll get to hear a rough snippet of a beautiful song called Come to the Water. I did double-duty on Sunday and it was beautiful to sing this after sharing my thoughts.

 

slide03

The Beatitudes are found in Matthew 5, where Jesus is sharing what becomes known as his Sermon on the Mount.

slide04

This beatitude stands out because of the verbs. The others talk about states of being but in this verse, it’s our action of hungering and thirsting that brings about satisfaction or fulfilment. Thinking this verse is simply about pursuing justice or righteous living is a shallow reading of the Scripture and forgets the broader context: Jesus is reframing the way the Israelites see and understand the Law as a way of living.

slide05

We are left with questions and I believe, this verse is about what we do with questions. Questions like what is it to hunger or to thirst. Most importantly, what is justice? What is the right way to live?

Why does this matter? Because we are people who were ripped from the Garden, where we used to have the freedom to ask God any question we had. The Beatitudes are a garden moment for us – momentarily we are returned to communion with God.

slide07

We began in the garden, our birth and creation story. Before our way of living in the world was defined by the morality we encountered eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Our understanding of right and wrong became the system that gets in the way of our intimacy and communion with God. When we had questions, we used to ask God. Now when we have questions, we look to the Law.

slide08

As human beings we are drawn to systems. We love structure and how easy systems make it to navigate through the vast amount of data we live with in the world. So we classify and categorise. We define things as good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or not beautiful. Worthy or unworthy.

This is ok, this isn’t. You’re that kind of person, we’re this kind of church, we are those kind of people. On and on it goes. But the more the world changes the more classification is required to understand which categories fit what.

slide09

The Israelites had a way of dealing with this – they created laws around the law so there was no risking of not getting it right. But when we live in this way, it’s easy to see how quickly our categorisation gets in the way of our intimacy with God. And this is shallow living because the system of categorisation and classification is doing the work. We end up trusting our system of right and wrong instead of trusting God with the big questions we have.

And they are big questions about a world that is changing faster and more dramatically than what we can imagine. It’s no longer safe to ask some of the questions we’re facing because our system won’t cope.

slide11

As a youth worker and minister, people have frequently told me how far they feel from God. I am often asked what I think about a situation and what I think God thinks. And my response is that I have only one job: to get out of the way and gently push you back into deep waters. In deep waters, there is no constraint on the questions you might ask. You can swim deeply and learn again the ease and trust of intimacy with God. The fulfilment and satisfaction is found in being able to ask the questions.

If you find yourself holding on the answers more than embracing the questions, it’s time to turn around and head back out to deep waters.

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It’s important we become people who are brave enough to ask questions and a place that is safe enough to ask questions in. We are defined by the questions we ask and the manner in which we ask them.

Have thoughts or want to talk? Reach out.