Authenticity

Root Bound…

Posted on February 16, 201820 Comments

My jade plant is blooming. My jade tree rather, as it is bigger than either of my children were when they started second grade. I’ve had the plant for close to thirty years. Seventeen years ago, it was in a three inch diameter ceramic planter, a swan to be exact. Now it is busting out of a foot tall, eighteen inch diameter pot.

I believe it is root bound. When other plants I have started blooming after years of not, I was told it was because they were now root bound. Really? In looking at articles on root bound plants, it is reportedly a negative thing for the plant and ought to be rectified.

Yet, my jade tree is blooming elegant little white flowers at least once a year, starting about five years ago.

My sansevieria (snake’s tongue or snake plant), which I got off a clearance table at the drug store in a tiny square starter pot sixteen years ago and is now hundreds of times larger, filling a foot tall, twelve inch diameter pot, currently blooms a couple times a year that I know of. Some times the stalk of blossoms is inside the forest of leaves and I don’t see it until much later. Both of my asparagus ferns, sprengeri and densiflorus, which are not ferns nor asparaguses, bloom with wee white flowers and tiny berries. After decades of no blooming.

My hoya. Oh my gosh, the hoya carnosa blooms three or four times a year. Lovely dangling clusters of blossoms whose lush fragrance fills my home.

This root bound concept and it’s physicality. Root bound could mean I don’t venture out or try new things, don’t go new places, or experiment with new ideas. It also could be where I am now: having been many places and done quite a bit over the last twenty-five years, and then having lived a quiet, low activity life in 2017, my root bound-ness was solidifying to allow me to bloom.

I had several gigs in the last three months, challenging me to expand my repertoire, and spend time with my performance pieces of music and storytelling.

And myself.
The quiet time, seeming inertia compared to my previous level of daily and weekly activity, was a puzzlement to me. Then my jade tree blossoms sprung out and began to open, reminding me how I felt enervated by the gigs, by interacting with the people involved, and the preparation time.
That quiet time was as if I had become root bound: I nested, wrote daily in my Artist’s Way journal, stayed up late and slept late, dialed back on my real estate activity and ventures, read novels, and even took an occasional nap. I did all the life stuff of paying bills, doing my podcast, going to various meetings and all, yet I was quiet.
That quiet time was me becoming more stable in this chapter of my life. More confident in who I am. More sure of my talents. Forming healthy detachments. Resolving ambiguities about what I want now, what gives my life quality, and what nurtures me.

What nurtures me and forming healthy detachments are two things that have eluded me during my life prior to now – I learned as a child not to do those two things. The belief presented was “always take care of others, it is selfish to care of yourself.”

Yet when two friends, I thought to be close friends, walked away from me without a word, healthy detachment lessons appeared. I felt the loss of the friendship yet have been able to move away from having to fix the problem; the problem which I was unaware of and is not mine. And to be able to see these people on occasion and be present in that moment with them, carrying no negative baggage forward.
My two children are now young adults with life partners they have chosen; one lives thousands of miles away from me. Healthy detachment. I am still deeply connected to them, yet have no responsibility to fix their problems and challenges. I listen, and offer advice when asked.

Nurturing myself. My, oh my. Maybe it is not selfish to prioritize what I need and want, perhaps it is even the best choice I can make. Yes, there are endless needs of millions of people in the world as well as there are starving children in China (which is what I was told as a child every time I did not eat every single morsel on my dinner plate. Both my parents having been raised in the Great Depression, I get where their reasoning was coming from; I am also pretty sure that statement has unintentionally caused many an eating disorder by overriding kids’ natural self-regulation and limits.) However, my job at this time is to take care of me. I donate each month to multiple causes, as well as volunteer. Laugh-out-loud! I am still justifying nurturing myself and not being selfish!

Four years ago on a landmark birthday of mine, my drunkard’s bottle cactus (hatiora) exploded in small yellow blossoms; the plant looked like it was covered in a beaded hairnet. It had not bloomed in the previous twenty-plus years since my sister gave me a tiny fingerling of a start off her plant. It is now a thousand times larger. And in a pot it is nearly growing up and out of, the pot is about a quarter the size of the cactus. Its hundreds of tiny branches hang elegantly several inches. Nowadays, my drunkard’s bottle cactus blooms each year around my birthday.

There is a lot to be said for being root bound.

Santa & Perfection

Posted on January 28, 20185 Comments

What do Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and perfection have in common? They don’t exist.
There are a zillion articles on how to deal with the question from your child when they come to you asking if Santa is real or how does the Easter Bunny lay eggs. There are also a myriad of opinions about it and the circumstances of the child doing the asking.

I’ll just tell you the truth flat out: perfection doesn’t exist.

Perfection is taught, inculcated, and presented as the best option, as the only viable goal, as the normal expectation, and yet it doesn’t exist.
Perhaps it can be meant to encourage people to do their best. Okay. However, there is usually a significant downside when ‘perfect’ is not achieved: getting written up at work, shamed by co-workers and/or boss, made fun of in school, as well as taking a hit to one’s self-esteem and self-worth. Conversely, those people doing the shaming and making fun are often just blinkin’ glad it is not them being called out, so they pile in with the nay-sayers in order that their lack of perfection is not identified. Dang, that is an out-of-balance system.

I used to be in the camp of ‘Perfection,’ believing it is a good thing, we need to work toward it, and shaming people is a way to motivate them. With dismay, I admit I have at times been in the group of people who pointed at others to avoid the spotlight being focused on me. In retrospect, it was my youth, my mistaken belief that others’ opinions mattered, inexperience with detecting groupthink, and fear.

Groupthink is a phenomenon when a group’s desire for harmony or conformity results in irrational, dysfunctional, and/or faulty decisions. My, oh my. I did participate in that, even though it didn’t feel right, I was unable to stand up and say, “Nope.”

One afternoon, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, an honest lawyer, and a college student were walking down the street, they all saw the $100 bill at the same time. Who got it? The college student, of course, as the other three don’t exist.

We could each make a list of non-existents, however, groupthink does exist.
A driving component of groupthink is fear. It has a double edge with perfection: if I’m not perfect, then I’m not good enough. Oh la la, if I’m fearful that makes me controllable. There’s that busybody again: fear.

Tyrants, dictators, politicians, bullies, cops, teachers, CEO’s, supervisors, and parents, nearly everyone, have used fear to control. A light-bulb for me, a profound one as it so surprised me, was when I realized how a former boss controlled me with fear. When I saw that, it allowed me to see how her boss did the same thing.

The day the boss’s boss showed up to castigate me for an email that allegedly challenged her authority, I showed no fear as I wasn’t afraid, and when her intimidation and shaming strategy didn’t work, she left my office in a huff. I was calm, I answered questions evenly, I produced a copy of the offending email. Bonus round: I recognized that whatever was going on with her, was not about me. It was not until later in my mental replay, that I saw – without fear, I could be myself and not kowtow to their misuse of authority; and not be put in a defensive, subordinate position.

When the lawyer was waking up from surgery, he asked why the blinds were all pulled. The nurse answered, “There’s a fire across the street and we didn’t want you to think you’d died.”

Fear; fantasies that don’t exist yet serve a purpose for someone.

I’ll just tell you the truth flat out: you don’t have to participate in something that doesn’t exist. Your call.

Can’t Be Won, Just Played

Posted on January 18, 20168 Comments

Buchart Gardens - photo by Mary Dessein — Buchart Gardens – photo by Mary Dessein

How would you like to have Jack Lemmon telling you a story? A doozy of a story at that? A Steven Pressfield story.

“It’s a game that can’t be won, only played.”

Jack’s seventy-six year old voice, filled with wisdom and humor, recounting the lessons he’d learned about dignity, the appearance of it, and which of those two actually has value; the lessons he learned watching a man not only look for his authenticity, but to regain belief that such a thing exists. Jack’s voice resonating with a kindness and acceptance that only comes with facing fears over and over, surviving losses over and over, and then standing back up in order to keep on walking.

To find one’s authenticity in part requires that you get out of the way and let it surface. Robert Fulghum wrote about the time he saw a bumper sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think,” which set him off on a creative, introspective tangent about the truth in that statement as he reviewed his life.

I can relate. Times my brain told me to do one thing, seemingly logical and allegedly most efficient, while my authentic self, call it intuition or gut feeling, urged me to do something else. It seemed safer to believe what I thought rather than what I felt.
A significant factor, beyond my perception then, was that my brain is in cahoots with my ego. Of course, I did what my brain told me. I believed it. Was it that I wanted to look smart, appear competent, or to be right? Surely part of the equation. Just as surely, I got in my own way and had no clue I was the impediment, the derailer, the creator of the negative result, not random chance or bad luck.

True self versus ego, eh? Thinking my way through my out-of-balance checkbook register works well. Thinking my way through the conundrum of how to respond to a colleague’s ongoing rudeness or to a friend’s loss of a parent, not so much.

Jack, as his character Hardy Greaves, recalls the conversation six decades before between Rannulph Junuh and Bagger Vance.
“You don’t understand,” Junuh spouted back to Bagger’s advice.
“I don’t need to understand. Ain’t a soul who ain’t got a burden to carry he don’t understand. You ain’t alone in that.”

He responded, “I don’t need to understand,” because he understood a bigger, all encompassing truth?

Being told, “You don’t understand,” has shut the door on many things in my life, as I believed that a high level of understanding was the pivot that mattered. Assuredly, sometimes it does. Yet we come across the bigger truths which “You don’t understand” keeps us from seeing when we are locked in the belief that we are alone. The mistaken belief that our individual circumstances, feelings, fears, sorrows, mistakes, tragedies have to be understood exactly. That they have to be experienced by someone else so they know what we’re going through.

What difference might that realization have made when as an alcohol and other drug counselor, clients said to me, and to other counselors, “You have to be an addict to be able to help me.” Their idea that they were special and therefore alone? There is a phrase for that, ‘terminal uniqueness.’ I remember one lanky sixteen year old in particular, ambling up to me after I had spoken to a group of high schoolers about drug abuse, with his baseball cap pulled low over his face, sporting a whisper of a wannabe mustache, long arms dangling out of his off-white denim jacket, and stating it as if this were E = MC squared, he said, “You can’t help me unless you’re in recovery.” Did that allow him to keep using because no one was qualified to help him? A whole ‘nother discussion.

Over time, without divulging my personal history as that was a clear professional boundary, my response became, “Why is that? We don’t require gynecologists to be female, marriage counselors to be divorced, oncologists to have cancer, or judges to have been incarcerated. Why does a drug counselor have to have been addicted?” Sometimes, they would stop and go, “Oh.” Other times, they blew me off with the classic, “You don’t understand,” alas, shutting their door to the invite of change.

What a concept: I don’t have to understand your exact experience and feelings to be here with you, recognize what you’re going through, and support you.
You don’t have to understand my exact experience and feelings to be here with me, recognize what I’m going through, and support me.

“Time for you to choose.”
“I can’t,” Junuh shook his head at Bagger.
“You can. You ain’t alone. I’m right here with you. I been here all along. Now play the game.”

You are not alone.
Neither am I. If I am silent and still, my authentic self will speak, whether quietly or with a charge of adrenaline.

“It’s a game that can’t be won, only played. So I play.”
Thank you, Steven.

Root Bound…

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