reality

Situational awareness.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

I was robbed recently. I was enjoying lunch with a treasured friend, undoubtedly lost in the delightful way she tells stories and looks at life, when my purse was taken right off my chair as I sat there unaware. The restaurant’s security cameras showed two women, the perps, dressed in hot pink and bright orange, casually taking my purse and then driving off in their Mercedes (!) to Target where they started to put my credit card to work. The nerve.

I realized this incident had affected me more than I realized when the dreams came. Home invasion dreams where I was in my childhood home trying desperately to figure out how to protect my mother. I grabbed her and ran to the bedroom door, but men were trying to get in there, too, in tactical gear and heavily armed. I was running through all the escape possibilities in my head, realizing we might be trapped and I wouldn’t be able to save her, when I woke up, heart pounding.

So how do I quell these troubled waters. First, of course, was to cancel the cards and block my phone. But the next step is maybe the best for easing the troubled mind. Mr. Rogers reminded children to look for the helpers in any crisis. For me, helpers would include that friend, a retired nurse, cool under pressure, who dashed to my car to prevent the thieves, who now had my keys, from stealing it. I had visions of her clinging to the hood while they used the windshield wipers to dislodge her, but that’s my brain in overdrive not the reality. Instead, there was another helper who found my purse, sans phone and credit cards, abandoned in the bushes. Due to the kindness of the people eating around us who had responded to my yelps of distress and pointed me out to her, I got my purse, and key, back. And then there was the restaurant manager who calmly rebuffed my repeated and emphatic suggestions to plaster warnings about thieves everywhere, but instead saved all the identifying information on video for the police to follow up. He mentioned we all need to cultivate situational awareness.

Situational awareness. And therein lies the rub. I want to live in a world where I can have a leisurely lunch with my friend and no one is casing the joint, looking for some unsuspecting mark to rob. That would be a better world! But it’s not this world. So if one of us needs to change, the world or me, it will need to be me.

And as I stewed on these words—situational awareness—it occurred to me that they apply to pretty much everything. We have to stay focused on the world we have, the reality, and bring our attention to that place and circumstance and base our decisions and actions on that. Not on the world we wish we had, but the one we do have. The place we are. The reality we must confront. That’s where the real work gets done and progress gets made.

In his book, The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck starts with the given, Life is difficult:

He goes on to say some equally profound things about how if the world isn’t aligning with our understanding of it, it is our understanding that must change, not that we should lie to ourselves to pretend the world supports our image. He likens it to maps. If the map you’re using isn’t getting you to where you want to go, it is the map that’s wrong, not the reality. The map must change.

As we look around, where are the places that things don’t make sense? The places our maps aren’t getting us where we want to be? Maybe things that are different now than they once were? Where do we need new maps?

We need to stay dedicated to reality, as much as it might trouble us, and adjust our maps so we can get back on track. Peck concludes :

The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given up up the effort. …Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining their understanding of the world and what is true.

Looking closely.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

One of the lessons from my elementary school days that still stands out in memory was flower dissection day. I was astonished with the intricacy in a flower. Where before I saw just a flower, now I saw intricate systems for reproduction, male and female organs, color and smell to attract pollinators, a whole interconnection of systems. And this was just what I could see with my naked eye. Later I would discover the microscopic diversity and complexity of plant life. But then as a little 8 year old girl, I was gobsmacked with the complexity of it all.

Isn’t it all miraculous?

These days I need to stop and remember to let my much older self still stand in awe of the complexities of life. The interconnectedness of creation in all its abundance, from the dung beetle pushing its treasured clomp up a hill backwards with its hind feet, to the elements swirling together in a once in a generation storm.

Standing in awe requires both decentering ourselves and paying attention, absorbing both the tiniest details and the grand ones, and realizing our small place in the midst of it all. And even we humans are an amazing complexity of systems and organisms functioning together to keep us alive, made up of around 30 trillion human cells, and 39 trillion non-human microbial cells living on and in us. Our own body is essentially made up of many separate ecosystems. It is staggering.

I love being gobsmacked.

Brave and afraid at the same time

Posted on by Shari Swanson

In this interview, Brené Brown discusses the complexity of emotions we are experiencing as a result of the pandemic and social isolation. Her words bring comfort and solace to all of us, but particularly those of us raised to believe that only positive emotions should be felt or expressed.

These are tough times. And it’s particularly difficult because this is not an emergency you have to gear up for and get through; it’s a slow burn. As she says:

“Normally, in order to get through a crisis, you know, our bodies are built to respond with a lot of adrenaline, a lot of energy, a lot of super coping surge. And then the waters recede or the fires are out or, you know, the crisis ends and we slog our way through kind of cleanup and trying to find our new normal. But we are not going to be able to depend on the adrenaline surge for this, because it’s going to out- it’s going to outpace us. And I think we are hitting that moment where we are weary in our bones. We are physically tired. We, you know, anxiety, uncertainty take a lot out of us physically. I think, you know, we’re on Zoom calls. I don’t know what happened. Like, I work a lot to begin with, but I feel like I’m on Zoom calls from 6:00 in the morning until midnight. You know, and then we’ve got toddlers crawling up our backs and partners trying to, you know, tell us to be quiet. They’re also are being called. And we’re tired. And I’ll tell you, the other thing that’s exhausting; that we are not acknowledging – again as a collective – is grief.”

And the grief is perhaps more extensive than any we’ve felt before. It’s grieving a loss of everything that was normal to us. Brown explains, “Well, I think it’s a very difficult position we’re in right now because I think we are both grieving the loss of normal and grieving the ordinary moments that make the touchstones for our lives. We’re grieving the loss of those at the very same time we’re having to find and settle into a new normal. And those two things are very difficult to do. At the same time, not mutually exclusive, but as close as it gets without being mutually exclusive. So there’s grief, I think. Grief is the loss of normal.”

And it is ok to experience that grief and mourn those losses. We are vulnerable, and there is no shame in acknowledging that:

“To be alive is to be vulnerable, to be in this pandemic, is to be vulnerable every second of every minute of every day. And the thing about vulnerability is it is difficult, but it’s not weakness. It’s the foundation and the birthplace of courage. There is no courage without risk, uncertainty and exposure. And so, you know, I’ve asked 10000 people that this question, starting with special forces military: give me an example of courage in your life that did not require uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. And in probably 15 thousand people at this point, not one person has been able to give me an example of courage that did not require vulnerability. So we need to dispel that mess and we need to acknowledge we are in a lot of vulnerability right now. That means we can be our best, bravest selves or we can be our worst selves, and I think the thing about choosing to be our most courageous selves is having to understand this is another method to style that most of us know we’re taught growing up that we’re either brave or afraid, that the truth is we can be brave and afraid at the exact same time. Most of us are in these moments today.”

We can be brave and afraid at the exact same time. We can be strong in our vulnerability. And, even though we are living a new normal, we can choose how we show up there.

Grief, that’s what it is

Posted on by Shari Swanson

We are grieving, collectively, the world over, all of us. Grieving the past we’ve lost and the loss of the future we expected. Things will be forever different for us. There are stages to this grief, and we will all experience it differently. But it is in acceptance where we will find the ability to process it and move forward into an uncertain future. This is our now. This is what we have to work with.

In this excellent article on grief, David Kessler shares his thoughts on what we are all going through:

“Yes, we’re also feeling anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Usually it centers on death. We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we’ll lose a parent someday. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this, but all together this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.”

The article is well worth a read, as it helps us put the issues we face now in perspective and give voice to our feelings. He states:

“Understanding the stages of grief is a start. But whenever I talk about the stages of grief, I have to remind people that the stages aren’t linear and may not happen in this order. It’s not a map but it provides some scaffolding for this unknown world. There’s denial, which we say a lot of early on: This virus won’t affect us. There’s anger: You’re making me stay home and taking away my activities. There’s bargaining: Okay, if I social distance for two weeks everything will be better, right? There’s sadness: I don’t know when this will end. And finally there’s Acceptance. This is happening; I have to figure out how to proceed.

“Acceptance, as you might imagine, is where the power lies. We find control in acceptance. I can wash my hands. I can keep a safe distance. I can learn how to work virtually.”

Sometimes dealing with a problem begins with naming it. Grief, that’s what it is. Have compassion on yourself and others. This is hard.

How are we?

Posted on by Shari Swanson

weare.jpg

A guy cuts you off in traffic. How do you see him? Is he an inconsiderate lout caring little for the aggravation he causes you or a distracted hapless soul, perhaps late for an emergency? How we see this situation, or any situation, can have a profound effect on our lives.

In this thoughtful essay, Elizabeth Gilbert considers the power of perception. She recounts a time when her father and his siblings were reminiscing about their late mother and how she used to take a sip from any glass of milk she poured for them. They agreed on the fact, that she took a sip, but wildly disagreed on their perception of that fact:

At one point, they found themselves sitting around the old kitchen table, eating sandwiches and talking about the past. My uncle, the baby of the family, looked at the refrigerator and said, “I can still see Mom standing there, pouring me a glass of milk. Do you remember that sweet thing she always used to do whenever she got us a glass of milk? Remember how she’d take a tiny sip first, to make sure it wasn’t spoiled? Always looking out for us.”

My father, the analytical engineer of the family, raised his eyebrows. “No,” he said. “You are so wrong. Mom wasn’t sipping our milk to test it for freshness. She was sipping our milk because she always overfilled the glass. She had no sense of spatial relations. It used to drive me crazy.”

My brilliantly sardonic aunt looked at her two brothers like they were the biggest idiots she’d ever seen.

“You’re both wrong,” she said. “Mom was stealing our damn milk.”

So, what have we learned about my grandmother from this story? Was she a devoted caregiver, an incompetent dunderhead or someone who would steal the milk out of the mouths of her children? (Or maybe just an exceptionally thirsty woman.) The world will never know the truth.

But does the truth really matter?

I don’t think so.

Wow! What a remarkable difference in what each brings to the encounter. Now imagine yourself in each of those mindsets: hostile, critical, or grateful. Which would lead to the happier life?

We don’t have control over facts, but we sure have a tremendous amount of control over how we perceive those facts. We owe it to ourselves to try to see the facts in the most favorable light even if that means consciously going over all the possible interpretations of something and actively selecting the best one to pick.

 

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Knock out punch.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

wantittobe

There is one opponent who will beat you every time: reality. No matter how you might want to characterize, ignore, explain away, deny, or pretend, reality won’t be the one to budge.

You must bend.

We waste our time longing for realities that don’t exist or pretending things are somehow different than they are. This is true whether we’re talking about relationships, our past, or the weather.

When we can look at our circumstances clear-eyed, then we can figure out how best to proceed.

What’s shadow?

Posted on by Shari Swanson

suffer

How many of our daily fears and worries are consumed by things that may never happen? Or by inferences or assumptions that may not jibe with did happen? Or by reliving in our heads over and over again past trauma?

How much suffering is from the actual event or trauma itself?

Sometimes it’s helpful to breathe deeply and remind ourselves of our connection to the earth, our senses, this place and time. Our worries and fears can run wild if we don’t constantly remind ourselves that they are not solid like a pebble in our hand, but amorphous and changeable depending on our perspective.