Chapter 9 of my memoir, The Underage Traveler: Essays On An Unprepared Journey. It describes when I first met my wife, Teresa when finishing college at WWU. Reading through the manuscript, I recall the time vividly and it strikes me how innocent we were. After twenty six years of marriage, if I could speak to myself back then what would I have said?
Be patient. Be kind. We all have shit we are dealing with.
Whatever you fear
what you are wary of
what you despair and lament
I lost a client yesterday. Funny, that is is almost as hard to acknowledge than to receive the email from the client in the first place. The truth is, I don’t do vulnerability well. Saturday I went for a walk with a friend who had recently returned from walking the Camino del Santiago and we were getting together to hear about her journey, but we ended up talking about me and my silence (safe to say, I’m usually the chatty one). As she did, I felt a heaviness come over me like a wet wool blanket. I stared at the ground as we walked, kicking gravel out of my way as my jaw slacked. And it dawned on me how much I silence my voice when I am feeling vulnerable.
It is okay
you are not alone
your feelings are known
I have a shadow that moves when I am feeling weak. It is the Warrior archetype and it moves in quickly to protect. It has done its job well over the years, and yet I find it serves me less and less these days. The absence of pain equates to the absence of healing, and I shut myself down.
In the depth of your anguish
remind yourself you are here for a reason
you matter
more than you can see, or hear, or touch
Interestingly, it is here where my work saves me, time and time again. In preparing for a group facilitation I decided to show the Brene Brown TedTalk on vulnerability (if you have not watched it before, I highly recommend it and have linked to it). I have watched Brene’s talk many times before yet I don’t ever seem to have recalled it when I needed it most. Until this week. When in deciding whether it was appropriate to include in the facilitation, I realized it was for me. Because I needed to hear it really bad.
Be patient
breathe
and in time your purpose
will be known to you
But, back to losing a client… The irony in this is I had been feeling for some time that I had lost their ear and what I was delivering to them was having diminishing value. Yet, as always seems to be the case, I depend on the retainer fee and the tension between those two polarities has had me frozen in inaction. Until this weekend when after my walk and talk with my good friend, I had decided to broach the issue of reframing the work or ending the retainer. As much as I feared that conversation, I felt empowered by the conclusion. Then I got sick, and while sleeping it off yesterday I received an email from that client that they were suspending the work due to financial reasons, etc. Reading through the lines, I know what lay at the heart of their decision because it had been my conclusion as well.
And your struggle, your moaning,
your aches and pains, and impatience
will be as echoes on the wind
And this is where it gets interesting. While I had already resolved to terminate the work if needed, receiving the email from them first triggered all kinds of emotions around scarcity, lack of self worth and shame. As crappy as I have been feeling, it was blessing that I was sick because my Warrior kept his shield and sword sheathed, and allowed me to experience the emotions without getting in the way. Raw, unfiltered lament. It sucked and yet was so necessary.
Nothing of consequence
nothing of gravity
is absent of suffering
All of which prepares me for the next journey, because as I have experienced time and time again, when the proverbial door closes, a window opens.
The only question to ask yourself is
what are you willing to suffer for?
I could watch this powerful TedTalk from Brene Brown a thousand times over and it would still hit me between the eyes every time. If you have not seen this before, I guarantee it will be some of the best 20 minutes you ever spend…
Chapter 8 of The Underage Traveler. Alice was a girlfriend I met while at Western Washington where I’d enrolled in college. It is surreal writing about this now as I recently moved my youngest up to Bellingham to start school.
I am not where I thought I would be. I do not feel how I thought I would feel. I am not doing all that I thought I would be doing. And it feels as though I am falling behind.
If there is one thing I am convinced of in acknowledging these brutal truths…I am not very good at predicting when, or how something will happen. And yet I am compelled by visions and intuition that have proved truth enough times over to assure me of my endowments.
What gifts lay within beguile in close proximity to myself.
How am I to reconcile these things? It seems as though without the uncertainty and unknowing, that the vision would become pedestrian and unworthy of the good fight. And yet it is these attributes that plant the seeds of doubt and lament. By not knowing how long or by what journey it will take, the vision is held in the balance of either coming into being, or vanishing with every misgiving.
All of which brings me back to where I am, which is not where I thought I would be. And what scares me more than anything is that I got it wrong. And that there are no do overs.
With our youngest launched off to college this fall, we are officially empty nesters. When I have mentioned this in conversation with various people, the usual response I get is, “wow, aren’t you lucky! Sell the house now before they return!”
I don’t get it. That is anything but how I feel and if anything, it’s the opposite. Don’t get me wrong – there are a multitude of small things that don’t raise my ire anymore, like tripping over the pile of shoes in the entryway, or the trail of backpacks, school work, dirty socks and hoodies leading from the front door to the pantry, or the front driveway that has looked at times like a used car lot. But, the truth of it is that all these things are indications of what I cherish deeply – the company of my children.
And while I have been anticipating our youngest’s departure with excitement for him in his new journey, I have also recognized that I have been grieving for this transition; fearing the moment when the house will go unawakened in the morning, no longer jolted awake by blaring alarm clocks, squawking radios, and whining blow dryers.
Gathering dust and bed sheets that go undisturbed now mark the time until their return during the holidays. Until then, I am left to my own thoughts about what I was, and was not as a father, and the inevitable dull empty of not being able to do anything more than to ask their forgiveness and remind them that one day they will ask for forgiveness from their own kids.
For what they will be as a parents, and not.
Succeeding in Life 