by tashmcgill | Nov 20, 2014 | Culture & Ideas, Health, Mind, Relationships
I’m sitting in a kitchen in Tennessee, looking out the window. I have arrived too late to see the turning of the leaves but as the cold November wind blows through the trees in the yard, I see them fall, fluttering yellow gold and bronze.
I’m reminded of a song, an old jazz standard, ‘Autumn Leaves’. It was a favourite of mine for a long time. I hum it now gently to myself and remember listening to Nat King Cole with a glass of red wine in front of the fireplace. I’m smiling now, into my coffee cup. It’s a romantic kind of feeling, being in a place you love with people you love and who love on you. I’m already anticipating the coming knock at the door. A treasured one is travelling from Atlanta to get here and my pulse races knowing the next few days will be full of love and laughter. We’ll be good to each other, these loved ones and I.
I am romancing myself. Lingering, filling up my senses with moments that are good for my soul. Romance is good for us, it gives you stories worth telling. This is really the heart of my annual Thanksgiving sabbatical, a chance to immerse myself in the feeling of being alive.
(more…)
by tashmcgill | Oct 26, 2014 | Culture & Ideas, Leadership, Mind, Strategy
It’s Friday night at 6.01pm. I’ve just clocked out 43 hours in a 4 day work week. I’m about to go to dinner to celebrate a friend’s birthday. I’ve managed to see friends a couple of times this week, smashed fewer than usual gym sessions but still lost weight. I’ve meditated, left room for spiritual things and even caught up on a favourite TV show. I’ve eaten right, but not too right. I’ve been well-behaved but not too well-behaved. I even managed to do an early morning daycare run for one of my best friends; playing aunty to their 2 year old girl. And I’m telling you honestly, if this is my life, this is not enough.
This is not about being too busy. This is not about being tired or trying to achieve higher heights at work. This is not about the tension between the corporate career life I’m in and the not-for-profit, youthwork and hospitality life I love. This is not to complain because I know I’m blessed. It’s not because I’m lonely or pining for what I don’t have. I am wringing the marrow out of life on a daily basis. But this is not enough.
I live between two conflicting philosophies; one that compels me to use whatever I’ve got in my hand to do whatever is in front of me and the other, calling my attention to the horizon and all the possibilities beyond it. One hand holds tight and says, ‘be good, be useful’. One hand reaches out towards what might be and says, ‘be more, do more’.
I have to get comfortable telling the truth, to myself as well as others.
No matter how hard I work at my job and how much better I can be, or how much I achieve,
(with strengths and weaknesses)
No matter how rich and deep the social circle,
(too good already)
No matter the gracious chance to love other people’s kids,
(I’m so grateful)
No matter how healthy or strong or skinny I might become,
(with all the trappings of vanity)
This is not enough.
I am a Futurist, as well as a few other things. I’m always looking to the future possibilities and trying to figure out how to get there. But that’s not why this is not enough. It’s not enough because these things are meaningful for other people, not for me.
I’ve come to know that I work better when I am part of a team, because I find meaning in the dependency that we have on one another. It propels me forward. It gives me a story to tell, a story that is ours. It’s not always easy to form a team or to form a team that has shared meaning and story but it’s even harder to be one person who’s lost the meaning of their own story.
I once had a singular focus and ambition and I’ve spent a few years now trying to find my meaning in other stories and in new places only to circle back around.
I can only imagine that this is close to what some mothers feel, when their careers and life paths change to centre around newborn babies and growing children. A re-orientation, losing a sense of self while becoming part of a new team. Sudden, the story of our kids tends to be centre stage.
So this, what defines my life right now – is not enough, simply because it’s not the story I want to tell at the end of my days. Or even today. The meaning I’m after (the ambition that has simply been buried and biding it’s time) is still the same. The values that drive me are still deep at the core of who I am and the story I want to tell.
I wrote a collection of these lines in 2008:
there are the dark days
that cloud the mind right from the start
there are the eulogies i compose
melodies i’ve learned to sing
by heart when i’m alone
afraid my life might be a song of sorrows
unless i find the meaning
there is a quietness that i have never shaken
a terrifying absence and conviction
that most of what i dream will never come to pass
i imagine life too big before i start
but my ambition is to make a difference
as large a one as i might ever conceive
if my name is never known
the ambition is the same
i’d make a difference in your heart
i’ve read ten thousand names
and whispered them aloud
i’ve spent long nights awake
perfecting every part
i’ve listened to the heartbeat
of a thousand lives
and heard the same refrain
and my ambition is to make a difference
collecting all the stories my life is made of
and if i could somehow remember all their names
my ambition was to make a difference
and their names would make the finest start
The truth is, I do want more. Maybe it’s because I want to have children of my own to invest in and it could be that’s selfish. But I also want to make a difference to the world at large. I don’t want or need fame, but I crave influence – to enable change for the many. I’m ambitious enough to believe I could do it. In fact, in my deepest secret self, I believe I’m meant to, somehow, be part of something bigger and more significant than my life alone.
At high school we completed the clichè ‘write your own eulogy’ assignment. I wrote simply, ‘She made us think differently.’
I still want that, and so this is not enough.
by tashmcgill | Oct 22, 2014 | Bodies, Culture & Ideas, Health, Mind
I got to 200 the other day. 200 gym sessions this year. I train for lots of reasons.
I need the stress release of boxing.
I like to talk to my trainer who is both my friend and therapist.
I like getting up to go to a place I want to be in the mornings.
And then there’s the real reason, that I sometimes admit to myself.
Because I want to be beautiful, I secretly whisper to myself.
Then I have to follow it up with empowering feminist phrases like ‘beauty is strength’ and ‘healthy is beautiful’.
But I released when I counted to 200, I’m not chasing beautiful at all. I’ve been chasing normal these 200 sessions or so. In fact, normalized beauty is probably what I’ve been chasing since my early teens.
So much comfort is found when you can establish your identity within the spectrum of normal. Society doesn’t push uncomfortably on any of your sharp edges that way. Nothing feels like a mis-fit if you can find a spot in the middle of everything.
Normal is not even about being a certain weight or shape. It’s about fitting in. Fitting into clothes, fitting into expectations, fitting into.. normal. Fitting in substitutes for having a sense of belonging, but belonging to what?
Normalized beauty is a set of homogenized templates. Haircuts, fashion cuts, brow styling. Slightly deeper we get to athletic versus curvy and I’ve already talked about the fashionable butt trend. I was just reflecting on the waif trend of the early 2000s. Normalized beauty changes to reflect societal trends. Normalized beauty is formed by comparisons and averages.
So that changes something for me, because actually I’m not humble enough to aspire to normal. I want to be beautiful. I want to be extraordinary. I want to be captivating – and I want to be all of that beyond a normalized beauty template.
At my age, the internet and Facebook is full of pithy sayings and blog posts from women who mean well. They write about becoming comfortable in their own skin, loving their stretchmarks and how their partners are truly attracted to them when they are full of confidence. I want to rally against that, because it feels like just another form of normalization.
I do want to be beautiful in ways that are more than just my body, my shape and my skin. I want to be seen as beautiful in all the ways that only I can be seen. I want to be incomparable, therefore nothing about my beauty can be normalized. I think we all do, men and women alike.
I think I am idealistic. At my age, I’ve pursued this game before. But perhaps it’s not a game. Perhaps all I’m chasing at the gym each morning is strength. Perhaps it is confidence that makes you beautiful, once you know who you are. Perhaps it’s having confidence that there is beauty within you, instead of being concerned with how I average out on the scale of ‘normal’.
Normalization is a creeping vine that has the power to choke us. It pushes us to keep up with the ‘human experience timeline’ – marry at a certain age, buy a house, have kids, change careers, travel overseas, buy that beach house… and so on. Normalization starts on the inside though, in how we see ourselves, then how we see others, how we relate or compare ourselves to others and then how we compare against the timeline.
It comes back to identity. Who am I? What am I about? Where and how do I find meaning for myself. What am I going to do about it?
I’m going to get up in the morning and hit the gym for session #201. I’m going to look in the mirror and see what I see, instead of what I’ve been looking for. Instead of chasing normalized beauty, I’m just going to chase uncovering, discovering me.
by tashmcgill | Oct 15, 2014 | Culture & Ideas, Mind, Spirituality
The greatest churches I have been to, I’ve never crossed the threshold of. I couldn’t give you directions to them, or tell you ahead of time.
I’ve simply found myself in the midst of them as they have risen around me. Great cathedrals of human expression… Songs of triumph, hope and victory, psalms of despair and suffering shared through the rhythms of shared humanity that seem to rose up from the earth.
I know one thing to be true: genuine spirituality of any form is both individual and shared. Both elements are required for authenticity. A genuine internal engagement and shared common experience.
That raw spirituality, the ruach Elohim, the wai rua that rises when humanity reaches outside of it’s current self and toward something other… That is where I have been to church, rarely on a Sunday.
In a swathe of human diversity, in dark halls devoted to melody, in moving picture shows seated next to strangers..In concert halls, food halls and markets where plates are shared and passed. Where sight, sound, smell, taste and touch are swamped in sensory experience.
These are the great churches of my generation.
Too often, contemporary spiritual or religious practice has stripped “church” down to programmes and attendence, formalised patterns of reverence and expression. There is beauty and wonder in it, yes. But before we had liturgy, before we had structure, before we had church doors and pews – humanity has had stories, songs and music. We’ve sung our blues, our joys and our sufferings. We share language of human experience this way, we share language of divine encounters this way.
It is no surprise that music festivals draw out thousands, or that Burning Man encourages something in the soul that yearns for a gritty spirituality. These gatherings evoke the primal in us.
We ought to rid ourselves of any flimsy thread of cleanliness or tidiness between spirituality and humanity. It’s all dirt and grit and messiness, and we’re the better for it. We ought to rid ourselves of the straightlined pews more often when seeking genuine spiritual encounters.
When we loose ourselves into the dust or rhythm of a dance we learn as we go along – we realign to the balance of humanity and divinity in Creation. We ought to do it more often and at every chance.
So go to concerts, play live music. Buy a drum and bang it with your bare feet toes down in the grass. Breathe. Connect. Go to church.
by tashmcgill | Sep 25, 2014 | Bodies, Culture & Ideas, Health, Mind
I’m not Beyonce or Kim Kardashian, but I’ve got booty. And I’m resolutely proud of it, actually. Prouder now than I was ten or even five years ago. It’s a symbol of strength, capacity and my relative wealth. Still, I’ve scorned and joked my way through endless Instagram posts.
“Do you even lift?”
“Squats all day.”
“Every day is leg day.”
I never considered myself to be body-obsessed, let alone butt-obsessed. Body conscious, for sure. Who isn’t? I’ve written about those issues some. Then I was talking with my friend Jessie – the talented, intelligent and compassionate @bloore). In talking about self-image and the age of selfies, she told me about removing almost every mirror from her house so she could learn not to look at herself.
Jessie’s captivating thought, while not the central idea of my post is worthy of a summary. Our obsession with mirrors and now, selfies, causes us to form our identity or self-image from an external observation. We observe ourselves and pass judgement or scrutinize our flaws. (At the same time, I think it gives us carte blanche opportunity to indulge our vanities too – TM.)
So I tried it for a few days. I paid attention to how I used the mirror. To be honest, I think I did ok. Not that many selfies, a tiny mirror in the bathroom doesn’t allow much scrutiny and there’s no full length mirror in my bedroom either. That might explain a few things. But I was totally mistaken.
I realised what was happening while I was walking to work. Past a run of glass windows, I caught myself studying my reflection. I’m a secret glancer, but not too secret. I caught myself almost every day. Not just mornings, but on the way to meetings and leaving at the end of the day.
So I paid attention to the pattern my eyes travelled. Butt, hips, knees, hair, sometimes the shadow of my chin, and then my butt. Lingering on the butt, particularly if walking uphill. In the work kitchen, the mirrored splashback means I pay attention to my hair and eyes, same as in the rear-vision mirror of my car. But anywhere else, I was a butt-watcher.
Day after day, I caught myself in the same patterns. So I started to think even more about what I was paying attention to and what I was looking for. Then I realised it was beauty, normalised beauty. My stomach is strong but soft. My arms have definition and curves. My legs are powerhouses. I’m short and curvy and strong, but all of that is acceptable in the curvaceous globes of those gluteous maximus and their supporting muscalature. In those moments, I belong to the beautiful crowd – we are alike. Those rounded curves are just as well formed as some of the best I’ve seen, hidden in clothes.
That beauty is more than just a physical sense of appreciation. It’s deeper. We have to become reconnected to our bodies and integrated with what they tell us. My butt is a staunch reflection of my character and personality. Gregarious, generous but in proportion, equal parts soft and strong, with strength that can’t be seen but only felt or experienced. My butt is one part of my body that really feels like me, if my heart and soul was flesh and blood. And my ass doesn’t make apologies, or demand them from me. It just opens doors with a kick of my hip or sashays down the pavement when taken by the mood.
I’m in two minds about the the endless parade of booty songs on the radio – they are not the kind of empowering I was looking for. But they rightly give women the opportunity to reclaim their bodies. I just want to reclaim mine for more than sex, whilst still being sexy.
I don’t wear yoga pants outside of the gym. I do wear tight jeans. My ass is not #belfie-perfect but I do squat and lunge and lift and climb steps taller than my calves. My ass is not a sex-symbol, it’s a powerhouse of confidence. That’s no brave feminist voice, either. I literally can carry 15 – 20kgs of toddler on each hip, supported by that butt. It powers me up stairs faster than my long-legged colleagues and it cushions every hard and cold surface I have to sit myself on. Am I a proud butt-watcher? Well, I don’t know. I’m not watching anyone else’s. I just see what my own is accomplishing and feel somehow stronger. I appreciate how I fill out my own jeans. I’m not likely to post a #belfie anytime soon – but I have a butt worth admiring on it’s own merits.
What is this vanity – this self-obsession with my physical being that can produce such torment and such joy, such satisfaction and a sense of pride? Can I weather it, just accept it and let it be – that the one thing I might catch myself watching is the one thing that gives me confidence instead of robbing it?
There are other parts of my physical self I might add to the watching list then; my cooking callouses, my calf definiton, the scalloping abdominals under their soft stomach blanket. The skin that carries my stories in tattoo, the eyes that are equal parts my mother and father. There are many parts of my body I would reclaim and let them be pride-stirring, strength-giving reminders that I am in fact, not my body. But my essence is reflected in it.
by tashmcgill | Dec 12, 2013 | Culture & Ideas, Mind
It’s possible, you know, to get stuck in a moment. To get stuck in a feeling. Reliving the words someone has spoken to you or about it. Reliving the experience you’ve just had. Constantly re-imagining how it may have gone differently, worked towards a different outcome.
It’s possible to just get stuck by running a thought to it’s final destination and not knowing where to go next. Or to forget to change the tape in your head that labels you ‘failure’, ‘loser’, ‘not good enough’, ‘unloved’ … or conversely, ‘hero’, ‘person everything relies on’, ‘fix-it man’.
Stuckness has a lot of layers. At first it can seem like you’re trapped, closed in, prohibited from moving. But the truth is, you’re not entirely prohibited from moving, you’re just unable to move in certain ways. Or, stuck in certain patterns of moving that you can’t change without some external force or intervention.
Internal self-talk is one of these moments. Whether the tapes playing in your head are on just one theme or 12 different ones on repeat, often you can’t change the tapes without further input and help.
Same with rebound relationships and holding a grudge. You know it’s not a good idea, that it can’t get you closer to the end goal. But like a soccer ball covered in glue, these emotional habits can be so sticky that once you make contact again, you can’t let it go.
Then there is stuckness that is good. It’s the kind of stuckness you get to when you’ve been waiting for a while. It’s the kind of stuckness that slowly enables you to open your eyes and see what’s really around you. Spend enough time being stuck and soon, pathways and possibilities for becoming unstuck might appear where they weren’t obvious before. Being stuck gives you time to really observe your surroundings.
Being stuck is a great time to acknowledge how you got to where you are.
Sometimes, when heartbreak comes along, our natural tendency is to find someone to soothe the wound, to heal the break, to make us feel loved again.. but in these times, it can be better to be stuck for a while and get to know ourselves again.
Being stuck is actually, more often than not, a good thing. It’s an opportunity to call on those we trust and rely on to intervene in our situation.
A little unsticking strategy will always require a little effort and patience.
Not unlike writers’ block, a little waiting time is sometimes necessary for the right ideas and new opportunities to shake themselves loose. In the same way the gate and fencepost swell with summer heat and moisture, requiring effort and patience to open. Long walks in sunlit valleys lie beyond that fencepost, but not without time and work.
The trouble is, being stuck can feel like going nowhere, but a lot of the time, being stuck is just the break your sub-conscious needed to figure out what’s next and how to navigate it.
It’s like taking the precious seeds we carry, our hopes and dreams and then burying them down in earth, waiting and hoping for it to come back to life. It’ll take 6 weeks before that seed takes on a life of it’s own above the surface of the soil. It might even take longer. But Stuckness says, embrace the darkness and damp of the soil. Learn to be patient in the absence of light. Learn (and trust) that your time is coming.
That seed will likely sprout and look nothing like the seed’s skin it shed to become a plant, vegetable or flower. But it was never stuck. It was just the unseen growth that happens when it feels like you’re standing still.
