As seen on an urban street in Ontario...

Here we have a little bit of colour as we enter into a season of less colour in the visual landscape. We also have what seems to me to represent an intriguing story. Any ideas?

Upcoming Lecture in Kingston (free): Self-Compassion and Reactions to Negative Life Events

The Department of Psychology at Queen's University in Kingston is hosting a presentation on Friday, November 14th at 2:30 p.m. that is free to attend and looks quite interesting. It is by Mark R. Leary from the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University. Here is the description from the website:

"Ironically, people often treat others who experience negative events more kindly and compassionately than they treat themselves. Self-compassion refers to the degree to which people respond to negative events in their lives (such as failure, rejection, or loss) with self-directed understanding, kindness, and compassion. This presentation describes a program of research that examined the buffering effects of trait self-compassion on reactions to negative events, as well as the effects of experimentally-induced state self-compassion. These studies show not only that self-compassion is associated with beneficial coping strategies but also that self-compassion consistently relates to positive outcomes more strongly than self-esteem."  

Locations: Biosciences Complex, Room 1102, Queen's University

I recommend you check the department's website for up-to-date information. Click here for the link. Perhaps I will see you there?

Not For The Faint of Heart

"It's not for the faint of heart, is it?"is the exact line someone experienced with such matters said to me recently with respect to being a landlord in the province of Ontario. My response? A compact: "No, it isn't." In that brief exchange and dealing with the near tail-end of the latest challenging situation as a small-scale landlord, did I leap across some chasm into the "people who are not faint of hearts" group? Well, probably not. But the line certainly did stay with me and got me thinking.

I believe that sometimes in life, fierceness is required: a fierceness that is not without reins but is grounded in some deep, wise, and powerful energy that rises up to defend, protect and guide how this should be done. I have not read much about the spirit of the warrior, though the idea and image of a powerful, peaceful warrior has been presented to me many times. I imagine this grounded fierceness as like the energy of a wise warrior, not oriented toward unwarranted menace but toward the preservation of integrity. Perhaps sometimes (if not always), drawing on this fierceness becomes an antidote to "faint of heart". One dons courage and proceeds accordingly.

Maya Angelou's poem, Still I Rise, keeps running through my mind as I type about this topic this morning. I suspect it is because there is a tremendous strength in the words, a grounded fierceness, or warrior kind of energy to be sure. A few excerpts:

You may write me down in history

with your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

but still, like dust, I'll rise.

...

I rise

I rise

I rise.

If you haven't read it, or would like to read it again, a google search should lead you to the poem in full.

There is also no doubt the poem speaks of courage. Likely, courage and grounded fierceness go hand in hand. As I've previously mentioned, a question Peter Block's poses in his book, The Answer to How is Yes, is "what courage is required of me right now?" (p. 21). You could ask, what courage does this situation or feeling require of me? What wisdom? What grounded fierceness? Sometimes, it might be to speak up, to stand up, to stay the course, and sometimes it might be to change routes. It might be to work less, or less at certain things, to do more of something else, to breathe, to stay quiet, to be very gentle with yourself, or to be more still. What is your sense of this for your own life right now--a situation or feeling you may be experiencing?

If there is a poem or book you really like that comes to mind as you read this post, please share it by providing a comment to this post. (You can, of course, comment on other things as well!)

A New Address & A New Opportunity

Sustenance for the journey is a blog I began on wordpress in November, 2007 (www.sustenanceforthejourney.wordpress.com). During its first year of life, the most popular post by far was Beauty and Grief, which you may find by clicking here. I decided to migrate the blog, including the contents of the previous' months posts, to blogger, a move I made this weekend, so that I could gain some options I didn't have on wordpress and wanted. For those who have also used wordpress, you will know this came at the expense of losing some of wordpress's great features including the program that let me know which posts were the most popular!

As always, please feel free to share your reflections by offering comments to posts on the site.To help prevent spam, all comments must be approved by me before they will appear; however, rest assured I will approve all comments so long as they are positive or constructive in nature.

On the Chalkboard September 1, 2008

When Pablo Casals, the cellist, was ninety-one years old, he was approached by a student who asked, “Master, why do you continue to practice?” Casals replied, “Because I am making progress.”

–Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself, p. 257

(A fascinating, easy to read book concerning neuroplasticity.)

Staying In Your Own Lane

Over the week and perhaps especially today, I have observed myself drawing on scenes and interviews I’ve taken in of the Olympics and using them as grist for the reflective and metaphoric mill. The ideas of “focusing on your own game,” “running your own race,” and “staying in your own lane” were popular ones from my reflections over the past 24 hours and seemed to weave themselves into conversations I’ve had with others. These ideas come in part from an interview I listened to yesterday where strategies for running the kind of track races in which each person is assigned to and must stay in their own lane on the track were discussed. The interviewee explained how the athletes have practiced these races so many times, how they “know their times” (that is, how fast they can run), and that their task now, at these types of events, is not to worry about what other competitors are doing but to focus instead on their own lane, running their own race, aiming to perform up to or compete with their own personal bests.

This leads me to mention a book I’ve been reading this summer, The Answer to How is Yes, by Peter Block (2002). In it, he asks one to consider first the question “what matters?” rather than to bypass it and immediately jump to the question how–how do I do this or that, achieve this or that, solve x or y or get from point z to n? It is not a book against problem-solving and action but it is a book that encourages one to consider questions such as: is this the right problem to be trying to solve? Is this meaningful or important (and to me)? What is meaningful and important? What matters? What do I value?

Coming back to the race strategy, we might ask: am I running my own race or someone else’s? What do I want my race to be? What is my lane about? We might also remember the journey we are taking in our lane is ours. It is real and it matters.

At one point, Peter Block mentions the questions: “What is the transformation in me that is required?” and “What courage is required of me right now?” (p. 21). Also, “what measurement would have meaning to me?” (p. 23). I have heard some athletes speak of having faced significant challenges over the past four years–whether because of significant personal injury (such as broken bones) or interpersonal tragedy or loss. For some, getting to the Olympics was measurement enough, a meaningful accomplishment; aiming for a medal, though desirable, was not highly meaningful or the only goal or source of satisfaction. What measurement would have meaning for me? is a question I really like–not because I am gung-ho about measurement and certainly not about valuing people based on particular scores or number oriented results but because it invites each of us to consider, again, what is meaningful to me, in the context of everything else.

Sadly, I know that what can feel meaningful to a person can also lead them into all sorts of problems and traps. I am thinking of students I have worked with who have believed that a mark of 90 or more and no less is what has meaning to them. The trap here is often though that their belief, fear, and sometimes experience, based on how they have been treated by others, is that without the achievement of that marker, they are not of worth or value. The question of what measurement has meaning to me gets us closer to considering our own lane, assessing our values and directions and being guided more by that than swept along by what other people say or are doing in their lanes but it can still, of course, have pitfalls for us depending on our experiences thus far and vulnerabilities.

For those of you who have been watching–or participating–in the summer Olympics, I wonder what reflections you have had? What metaphors and ideas may have been presenting themselves to you?

Ebb and ____

Here we have a quick photo from today–strategically angled not for artistic merit but to avoid getting the dead squirrel into the shot–although coming to the end of writing the post and reading back through, I am wondering now if maybe I should have aimed to leave it in, to embrace that, too.

I share the photo here with thoughts in mind about cycle, rhythm, season, change, ebb, flow, swell, recede, wax, wane. Of the latter, it’s as if you cannot say one without the other: ebb pulls out from the tongue flow, wax attracts to pen wane. Try conjuring up rise without fall landing right behind on the runway; say up and in comes down. Scroll back a few posts and you will find a photo of daffodils in my yard that had just begun to bloom. Today the daffodils have long-faded from view and astillbe and sweet william, among others, are at center stage. This moment-by-moment changing, rising, falling, bursting, sag and wilt is always happening, always present, always everywhere. So I think it is with our journey: the ebbs and flows, rises and falls. It is all a part of the way.

I learned with much sadness earlier this week that Oliver Schroer died July 3rd, 2008.

There is life then death and also there is death then life.

I am thinking of the falling times people go through, the quiet times, the wilting times–and the emergence that so often comes after that: times of going inward, then going outward–the waxing and waning that David Whyte so powerfully talks about. In his talk, The Poetry of Self-Compassion (a cd I would highly recommend), he invites the listener to embrace it all: both the waxing and the waning, the highs and the lows, our strengths and all our seeming imperfections–and he suggests, essentially, that there is something very powerful in doing that. It seems to me that to walk with it all is the lifeblood of authenticity: to walk with acceptance, honesty, and tenacity leaning into pain, loss, confusion and into the richness of who you are, the wonder that is around you, and the deeply personal and positive contributions you can make.

I am holding in this moment Oliver’s death, the reality and inevitability of death, the plant in my yard I’ve longed named, Droopy, who is just beginning to bloom, and the laughter of a child.