Beauty

Serendipity

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I know I have already put up and posted some fall decorations (that’s about the extent of it for this season!), but I never posted about the highlight of my trip up north this summer. Maybe”highlight” isn’t really the right expression. It might make it sound like it was the best thing… that everything else was secondary to it. And that is not the case. I loved everything about being in Denmark! Lazy reading days on the scarcely populated beaches and the rainy days of antique shopping with my daughter; the cool cafés and scrumptious pastries; the delightful shops and the well-mannered, friendly, hospitable people; the trade-mark Scandinavian home designs- exterior & interior; the wide open spaces and the intriguing, tucked-away-in-the-woods places & spaces. So it wasn’t a “highlight” in a comparative sense.

Rather it was the cherry on top, flower in the lapel, sort of thing. It topped off an already successful vacation with just the right amount of unexpected, “just-because” kind of delight that makes everything else feel even better, feel “right” somehow. And it really did happen at the very, very end of our stay.

We had left the rental tidy, the car was loaded and all we had to do was to bring back the return bottles, fill up the tank and we would be on our way to Hamburg. We drove down the road from our rental and made a right onto the road we had taken most days to get to the larger beach ten minutes away, past the gas station to the small grocery store we had shopped at almost daily for our meals. We passed by a bearded man walking with a young, pretty, blond girl with black-rimmed glasses, whom my daughter pointed out, “Mom, look how adorable she is!” By the time I had registered what I had seen, we were already pulling into the parking-lot. “Oh wow, they look just like the family from one of my top favorite instagram accounts!” My daughter and I quickly got onto Insta to check and confirm it must be them. So I let her and Jan out of the car, too embarrassed to join me, and I drove back. Not seeing them, I made a u-turn to head back to the store. By then, they had come out of the Gas-station store and were now walking in the direction of the grocery store.

Writing this all down, it does give off some stalking vibes! Maybe even more than a little. Hmmm?. But I had to! To be honest, it felt like catching sight of an old friend or work colleague you hadn’t expected to see at an event. You have so many shared interests and history, that you just have to make a fool of yourself and call out to them across the large room of strangers, elbow your way through the crowd and say, “hi!” That’s all this was! Right? I mean, I’d known Anthony and Caroline for a couple of years, shared their aesthetic taste, was inspired by how they included their young children in their creative endeavors (something I had never been good at doing), and appreciated the beautiful things they were creating. The only thing that made it a little bit creepy is that they didn’t know me!

That had to change! I had to stop and tell them I was a big fan of the Instagram account documenting them as they restored and converted a small town doctor’s clinic into their beautiful home @-our-new-home-. I had to express my gratitude to them for sharing their creative content. I felt compelled to mirror back to them not only what a beautiful family they had, but what a beautiful family-life they seem to share. So that is what I did. I interrupted their little walk, introduced myself, and laid it on‘em!

I really hope they didn’t feel creeped out or disturbed. The exchange couldn’t have lasted much more than a minute or maybe two, during which Anthony graciously and humbly accepted my outpouring of praise. Once we were back on the road, Charis and I basked in the afterglow of what had just happened at least as far as to the ferry: “I can’t believe it was them!! What are the chances!?!” It had been the perfect bow to wrap up what had been, on the whole, a lovely ten days.

That was a little more than a month ago. And still, since then, I keep coming back to this encounter with some nagging questions. I can’t help but ask myself why I felt all those things. Why did I feel the compulsion to introduce myself? Why the need to express gratitude? Why did running into Anthony and his daughter feel meaningful and special somehow?

So after thinking a lot about it, I have come up with an answer:

Electricity.

“Throw the Ball of Yarn!” Is an uncreative name for an activity I’ve often done with groups, either for first introductions or to illustrate a basic principle of relationship dynamics. Everyone stands in a circle, and I have a big ball of cheap yarn which I throw to someone while still holding the end of the thread. Depending on the objectives, they are to either introduce themselves according to the given criteria, or respond in some way to what the yarn-thrower has asked or stated.

This palpable act of throwing the ball of yarn to someone represents what John Gottman Ph.d calls Bids for Connection. Anytime we share something personal with another or others, whether it be a need, a longing, a disappointment, something we’ve created, a boundary, or a joy, we are making a bid for connection. Even if my husband enthusiastically points to a new bird at our feeder, he is making a bid for connection. He is wanting to share his momentary awe and joy with me. Or in keeping with the illustration, he is throwing out a ball of yarn, a fishing line if you will, as an invitation to form a node of connection.

But throwing the yarn is only the invitation. It is, in and of itself, not a connection. To be a connection, the other must catch the yarn. And if that sounds obvious, it is even more so when one is actually standing in a circle throwing yarn at each other! But, evidently, it is not nearly so clear in the real-life of our actual relationships. So I often also describe this game in conversations with people to describe what appears to me to be a central cause for relational dissatisfaction and dysfunction, not just in the most intimate relationship of marriage, which the Gottmans explore in detail in their marriage books, but also in our wider social circles, both on and off line, which, in turn, inevitably weakens the broader fabric of society.

What does not catching the yarn look like in real life interactions? How does one catch the yarn? The answers to both of those questions in the microscopic will be as many and varied as grains of sand. We can deflect, defend, dismiss, disengage, devour, delude, deny, disavow… and we could go through the entire alphabet that way. But zoomed out, they will share common attributes. In the yarn-circle, illustrating the different attitudes we can take to the ball of yarn being passed to us becomes visceral. When the polyester clump just falls to someone’s feet with zero acknowledgement and no effort made to catch it at all, something that is all too common in our daily interactions suddenly becomes undeniably visible and palpable to everyone in the circle. We can also slyly shove it out of sight, as if it never happened, so we won’t be called on to make some kind of reply. We can just reflexively, maybe even aggressively bat it away. Or simply give lip service to it as we politely pass it on or stash it in our basement. The real life circumstances of not catching will vary in every shade of every color, but it will be in one of these three categories: some form of an aggressive refusal, a passive avoidance, or an inauthentic concession. Fight, flight/freeze, and fawning. Odd what a simple ball of yarn can make us feel when it is kicked aside after we have thrown it – our bid for connection.

What does catching look like? Again, in the details, like every color in the spectrum. From a higher altitude maybe something along the lines of “Please,” “Thank You,” and “I’m Sorry.” It doesn’t follow that Catching must mean we say yes to what is offered or asked of us. For starters, not every demand, enquiry, or request made of us is a bid for connection. Sometimes, maybe even a lot of times, it is simply some form of exploitation; to extrapolate some good or service from us without any meaningful connection at all. But even the genuine bids for connection that come our way can exceed our own unique capacity to accommodate them, and there are ways to catch these even if we can’t or don’t want to keep them.

Again, this can be easily demonstrated in the yarn-throwing-circle. There is a huge difference between letting the yarn fall to the ground in front of you unnoticed, and catching it softly, like in an egg toss, by expressing acknowledgement and gratitude for the precious gift of vulnerability – since the genuine bid for connection is always an act of vulnerability – and tossing it back, or onward, just as carefully. “Thank you for sharing with me, including me, thinking of me…I’m sorry I’m unable to meet your expectation for these reasons… Please try again or this instead…” One small stitch of human connection made!

I bet you didn’t think you were coming here to be lectured on group warm-ups and knitting social connection. You came to see what I meant by “Electricity” and what it has to do with the way I felt in Denmark meeting an Instagram hero of mine.

But it shouldn’t take much nudging from me to see what happens when we replace the yarn with a coper wire and add a battery. We get an electrical current. I believe there is a kind of “power-current” that circulates when real, human connections are made, when relationships are reciprocal, when attention, intention, and commitments are exchanged, when we choose to see each other, when we acknowledge the invitations for connection and handle them with care, and when, against all odds, we find some shared space, some point of value around which to meet, even if it is only two or three of us.

This is the current I felt on our last day in Denmark… in fact, I felt it the entire time I was there, but it peaked at that last encounter. Social Media can often feel like millions of balls of yarn being thrown around indiscriminately, and with the “Like” button hardly feeling like a sufficient catcher’s mitt, they are rarely soldered into meaningful connective conduits. I’m sure I don’t have to explain in any detail how attention begins to flow only one way in almost every media sector, even in this supposedly flattened one, and, beyond that, there is little to no shared Intentions or Commitments between the participants of this digital market place. In other words, one may become either an invisible, anonymous consumer or an increasingly more visible content-provider feeding hundreds, thousands, or millions of anonymous consumers. Either way, few real nodes of connection are being made, and where there is no connection, there is no juice flowing.

I am definitely on the consumer end of this transaction, having traded in buying decoration magazines for Pinterest and Instagram, so I can attest to this. The hours spent on these apps are certainly feeding something, they are just not feeding my most primal need for human connection. So when I happened to drive past a person who is at the top of an almost 70,000-follower-media-pyramid I belong to, from whom I have “caught” untold numbers of “yarn-balls,” you better believe I am going to grab the opportunity to try and make a genuinely meaningful stitch by tossing one back in a face-to-face encounter! For that brief moment, I was not anonymous. For that minute and a half, I was not invisible. In the space and time that it takes to make an introduction and say thank you, our wires crossed and, at least for me, released the flow of energy.

Serendipity

Serendipity, one of my two favorite words, is usually defined along the lines of “finding something good without looking for it.” A happy accident, as it were. But none of the definitions I found encapsulate the special flavor the word, or rather more to the point, the occasions for which we harness this particular word, has for me. It is not just any “good thing.” It is not just an accident. It is also not entirely accurate that one is not looking for it, since once it has happened, we realize that it is exactly what we were looking for, we just didn’t know it. I only ever use the word Serendipity to describe the unexpected convergence of the right good thing happening at the right time to make a needed or helpful or invigorating connection. And often it turns out to be just the thing that helps us move forward or get unstuck. Finding a hundred Euros on the street on a random Tuesday is a “happy accident,” but it is not necessarily serendipity. However, winning €10,000 in the lottery the very day the courts tell you you won’t get the €10,000 back of which you had been defrauded (true story – actually happened to our landlady!) – this is serendipity.

When I think of all the things that have to align in such moments, I cannot help but feel as if there is an undercurrent of power which, in some mysterious way, arranges the convergence for us. As if the time and place has been in the calendar all along, and we simply had not been told beforehand. I would even go so far as to say this positive, electric, under-current is always happy to flow through us and, needing these nodes of connection to do so, is willing to take some liberties with our schedules!

Hairy (in 3)

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About how I feel.

Ugh! Not this word! It is almost as bad as “moist!” But there it is, so I’ve got no choice but to spend the next 20-30 minutes writing about it. I could go the easy route and fetch up one of the many precarious situations our foster mother had gotten us into. But that would just be an avoidance tactic. I know what this has to be about. I know what needs to be said. And it won’t be pretty. It won’t be fun.

Women are HAIRY!

There! I said it! See where this is going? We grow hair. On our legs. Under our arms. We grow pubic hair. And now, at my age, we even start growing mustaches. It’s nature.

No, I am not completely liberated from the razor. I started shaving my legs and underarms long before the first hair even had a chance, so it is too late to stop now. Somehow we girls absorbed the message pre-puberty that becoming a woman wasn’t so much about the natural process of our bodies growing in certain ways, like hips, boobs, and hair, as it was about being able to use certain products, like bras, pretty underwear, and shaving cream. I cringe to think about how much of my puny allowance and baby-sitting money went to that crap… that and cigarettes!!

And it didn’t end there. Just last week, at my mother-in-law’s celebration, my 24 year old daughter told me I’d better take a tweezer to my upper lip (I had left my epilator at home), so I spent a few painful minutes in the bathroom plucking out the darker fuzz under my nose one at time until it met her approval. “Wer schön sein will, muss leiden!” “To be beautiful, one must suffer,” so the German saying.

But to what new torture has this younger generation acquiesced?! It infuriates me that the porn industry has reached so far into the main culture, that one would be hard pressed to find a woman under, what? 40? 35? Older? Younger? that has any hair at all anywhere on her body but her head. It is not enough that they are selling women string wedgies for the price of a fine bottle of wine, but now the culture is dictating that women masquerade as prepubescent girls for the rest of their lives to appease a pornography, excuse me, a child-pornography saturated male (and female?) population. Only children well under the age of consent have no pubic hair. Growing pubic hair is what happens when you grow into an ADULT. What does that say about those that are holding this up as the new bar of beauty sex-appeal for women to order their lives around?

Obviously I am not writing an expose with any facts, statistics, or personal profiles in the half hour I give myself to write my warm ups. And of course, I’ve not seen any of this for myself. But just knowing that women are going along with this is enough for me to tear my hair out!

My Striving and Me (part II)

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(This is the second part of To Strive or Not to Strive)

When I listen to Bilyeu and hear this oh so familiar clarion call to chase your goals with “these ten rules and this secret sauce,” I can’t help but wonder how my life has stacked up to my own dreams. I am no stranger to having caught a ‘vision’ for/of my future: the resonance I felt around teachers, speakers, and preachers even from as young as four or five; the inspiration and sense of kinship I feel when reading certain authors; the pure delight that these wordsmiths seem to forge in me; and the confirmation I received of my own abilities for writing/teaching/preaching during my time at college. But in the years since, I have had to contend with an undercurrent of panic fueled by the thought that I have somehow missed my calling, have squandered my gifts and training, and have receded into obscurity, having not filled in my spot of the grand puzzle.

I have so often flagellated my conscience for not hustling harder to make this future happen… that I have not already written my book, not already become a public speaker, not already unleashed a movement. I berate myself for getting distracted by the circumstances and the needs that those circumstances presented. Never-mind that these ‘distractions’ were that I fell in love, threw all my energies into raising a family, tried to form deep community, lived in several foreign countries and learned a few languages, followed my curiosity and my interests for designing spaces and events, worked for years for free to fulfill other people’s goals- I let them shift my focus away from pursuing this one vision of myself and my gifts!

Over the decades, I have felt the excruciating pressure of multiple longings and interests competing for my limited time and attention, and no matter which thing I focus on, feeling a sense of guilt and restlessness for neglecting the others. I have so often anxiously suffered under that sense of urgency to reach all of those goals before crossing that final finish line, before my time is up. Sometimes it seems to me that all these other needs and longings have led me down a different path entirely, have somehow stolen something from me… my future perhaps?

Compounding this dilemma, is the sad fact that I am the slowest human being alive. Implementing any one of the million ideas, the possible worlds that exist in my head, is an excruciatingly slow process. The ideas are backed up for miles and miles, each waiting impatiently for their day to be born into this time-space-matter matrix we call life. And just as waiting on too many tables always put me in the weeds and would find me in the walk-in fridge cussing and crying before the night was over, my inability to keep up with the onslaught of things going on both in my head and around me often overwhelms me. Because of this, I experience this creative process as a kind of hustle, an anxious striving, and always a race, not always against others, but always against the clock.

So the discussion that Dr. Lembke and Bilyeu have had is deeply relevant to me and touches on this irksome question about pursuing any goals of any kind, having any images at all to aim for, even as trail markers along the way, as we are guided by a worthy, universal, and truly infinite North Star. Does every image trap us in a dopamine-induced hustle for a finite identity based on a comparative/competitive measure/orientation? Is every creative idea an image casting on the pavement ahead of us, like hopscotch, that pulls us to scuttle and scurry after it? Every new thought and idea of what could be taunting the shortcomings of our current reality?

This is what I have struggled against for what seems like my whole life. The image of the idea in my head drawing the yardstick, the finish line, plum line for the reality that I struggle to make it become. The longing for a beautiful home, a worthy goal or a hustle for the hit of dopamine that status and comfort can give? The dream of a lovely garden, an expression of creativity, or a refusal to be content with things as they are? The vision for a certain kind of loving, intimate community, a new reality worth the effort and conflict, or proof of my intolerance for human fallibility? The log-jam of things to write about, raw ideas needing only the logic and language I can give them, or simply a restless spirit and an over active imagination? The impulse to preach/teach, a promise of certain contribution, or a pipe-dream that taunts me with FOMO? Change the world, or be content with the way it is? Lord knows the people telling me to leave well enough alone are stacked a mile high and more than fifty years deep.

A New Perspective

But while contemplating this conversation with Dr. Lembke and Bilyeu, I had a new thought, and for the first time I can remember, I can begin to feel the pressure lifting. This new thought rises up from a deep well I dug a long time ago and which has quietly sustained me all these years. This well is filled with the imperfect, but invaluable narrative and propositional wisdom which has been passed along through millennia like a precious family heirloom. Filtered? Worn? Problematic? Contextualized? Misappropriated? Shocking? Yes, I think so. And yet, I have always been able to trace within it, as if my finger were tracing a red thread, the very questions I ask of myself and the world today: Am I enough? Why am I here? And Where do I belong? And like a weary and bedraggled currier, it offers me a gulp of water it has smuggled through 3000 years of rough terrain, and instantly and instinctively I know that it is curative.

I am talking about the account of a shepherd boy’s rise to the throne in the Judeo/Christian traditional literature. In this narrative, when David is anointed in secret by Samuel to be king of Israel, he is still a boy tending his father’s sheep, and it isn’t until many years and many trials later that it actually came about. Joseph’s dream of ruling over his brothers is another such narrative. There are many other times the Universe seems to give people a peek into their future, though they still have a long way to go to get there, and if you are caught up on your quantum theory, it is no longer far fetched to believe this is possible. But even if the narrative is a fiction, a myth to transport a deeper truth, what is the wisdom it wants to convey? What is the medicine it offers me?

What is the message of such a future glimpse? “Here, you should strive to be king! And all of your priorities and everything you do should be oriented toward achieving this goal!”? Get yourself an MBA at King School, do these ten things and add this special sauce so you can claim your crown? I don’t think so. There is no indication in the narrative that David is being told what he should do or what should happen, but instead it relays what will happen. It is a promise. It is drawing back the curtains and saying, “look, this is in your future, for certain, so whatever else comes your way, whatever obstacles or apparent detours you may face, whatever menial chores, whatever or whoever conspires against you, whatever obligations or needs you will be asked to fulfill, don’t worry, it is not a fools errand! Because the outcome is already secured, you are free to give your full attention, commitment, and engagement to the moment by moment, the step by step of your life as it unfolds before you. You do not have to hustle for this future you have glimpsed. It already exists.”

The promise, the sneak peak, was not a finish line to ‘cross or be doomed’ with which God goaded him. It was not a Vision-carrot to increase motivation and participation in company goals. It was not a fix point of orientation around which to plot and scheme and prioritize the people, places and things of his life, so as to orchestrate that end. It was an “It is done” declaration that would be a go-to well of comfort and hope in the midst of the extraordinary hardships, challenges, and drudgery that David would face in the years that preceded his wearing the crown. Ascending the throne was not something David achieved. He became King. He grew into a sovereign able to exorcise authority on this level through a curriculum David would not have chosen nor have known to create for himself. In so far as David rose to face each of the challenges that confronted him, doing what seemed to be the right thing to do to the best of his knowledge and abilities for himself and his people (or sheep as it were) at that time, he collaborated in that process…leaving the outcomes to God, or fate, as you will.

So what if I have gotten it backwards all these years? What if this thread of longing and intuition I have had my whole life about the kind of work I should be doing, which has goaded me for as many years, was actually just a promise of what the fact of what some part of my future would look like? What if it was meant as an assurance to help me relax into my life, with all the unexpected bends and twists that it would have, and not panic about meeting the myriad of markers that are held out to us to gain “worthiness” points in this world? What if it was never meant to drive me to scurry along this yellow brick road toward some ambitious goal in the future so I will win the prize? What if instead, God was saying, this whole area is filled out already! This is who you are, past, present, and future, and it is enough! You are free to take it one step at a time, one challenge at a time, at your own pace. You are free to live in the moment of it, even while you and the universe move toward the future together in a collaborative dance. There is no hurry. There is no scarcity of time, because you will get there exactly when you need to.

Just because David was anointed King long before he would be King, God never said that is all that he will be. It is like David only got a glimpse behind the last window of the advent calendar, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t other windows, or that the same kind of chocolate would be behind every other door. Or in other words, we want to make a B-line from where we are now to some marker of success or fruitfulness on a distant horizon. We want to cut across the grass, so to speak. If we take that route, all we have from our lives is that one, well worn path and perhaps a significant amount of time being “ahead” of others and smugly waiting for them to catch up – or hoping they never do. This kind of hustle may get some somewhere faster, but almost always by externalizing the cost of their lives or denying and excluding other pressing needs. But just as disturbing, by having such a laser focus on some marker of success, we could be denying the fullness, depth, and dimension our life could have had, had we been fully present for all of it.

Life as a Spiral

What if instead of cutting across the grass, we are meant to weave a spiral out of what we’ve been given, the way one would crochet a round area rug from leftover scraps of material? Each crochet loop tightly stitched to the row that came before and the one that comes after, going around and around in a spiral, one stitch at at time. By the end, we will have a multi-colored, rich tapestry, full of unexpected things, hard things, joyful things. At any given point along our journey, we are what we have woven out of the scraps life has given us, and what we have woven forms the basis for what comes next. In this way our identity is our foundation not our orientation.

But if we were shown any one part of it, say a short stretch made from a silk tie, or worse yet, see someone else’s rug made of desirable fabric, we may come to believe that our whole rug should be made from that yellow and blue striped silk, spend our lives looking for this particular fabric, be willing to pay exorbitant prices for it, and waste all the good fabric we already had. That is the hustle. The striving.

So what could be a worthy orientation for our lives? I think to truly be a worthy North Star, it must be values that are infinite, eternal, and universal. It must give us the questions we can ask ourselves in any and every situation to help guide us. It must leave the door open for others, especially the least of these (anyone who is not/will not be instrumental to our ego-goals), to shape the answers to the question what is good at any given time. For me that leaves Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, in that order, as worthy points for a North Star. Not trying to Be Right, Good, or Beautiful (harmony of just relationships), but seeking them like water or oxygen to nourish a thirsty and gasping soul. My curiosity, my creativity, my energies, my attention, my resources, my competencies all attuned to seek and create these realities in my immediate vicinity, in others, in my circumstances, even in my enemies, as one would precious minerals, no telling where it may lead me save for the few reassuring glimpses I have tucked away in my heart. These are the magnets that draw me forward, as I stitch row for row on what came before, who I was every bit a part of who I am as the new creation I am becoming moment by moment. In this way, I weave a life that accepts the givenness of things even while I reach toward connection and grow in ways that are true and good and just for me and my neighbor.

Full Circle

The narrative in no way whitewashes David’s grave moral failings, and yet, in the final equation, it tells us that God chose David to be King because he had a heart after God’s own heart. Maybe another way of saying this is that David navigated his daily life oriented toward the North Star of the infinite, eternal, and universal principles of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, because that is what was most valuable to him. Even when looking into the mirror of truth meant seeing the ugliest things about himself and what he had done, he did not look away, nor did he expunge the public record of it. He was able to do this because he was deeply and securely grounded in the knowledge and acceptance that his past, present, and future self, his Identity, were in the hands of a power greater and more benevolent than himself, and would be enough.

Though Dr. Lembke and Bilyeu’s conversation was about understanding and moderating dopamine, the neurochemical responsible for motivation, at the heart of their exchange, I believe, is the age old duality between what is and what is not yet. The reality we are born into and the world we are creating. The centripetal forces that pull us around and around what is known, and the centrifugal forces that pull us out into that which is not yet known. To err one way is to circle in place like a broken record, to stagnate, to wither, and become irrelevant. To err the other way is to chase a mirage, dissociate, become unmoored, and be lost to chaos. I think what we are avoiding in our endless over-consumption of easy dopamine (and I am thinking of my own eating, binging, and shopping habits!) is the unique pain that each of these two forces brings with them. I wonder if the kind of balance that Dr. Anne Lembke is advocating is to allow both forces to act on our lives in a way that produces a stable but growing spiral. Not just chasing for the sake of chasing. Not just resting on our laurels, or on those that came before us. We form a solid and stable spiral by leaning into the promise and the pain of both of these forces. Facing what has come before and what is with radical honesty, embracing this imperfect reality with grace and compassion, and salvaging and curating whatever good we can with gratitude, while also allowing curiosity, creativity, and empathy to pull us outside ourselves so we may venture into the risk of failure and danger, as well as all the novel truth, goodness, and beauty that still lay waiting to be both discovered in and given to the world.