F for Feedback

If these walls could talk.

Seems they do.  In today’s UCC devotional, Pastor Talitha Arnold writes about a time when former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall spoke at her church.  She expected a political theme to his message, but he started out by talking about his childhood.  Specifically, he reminisced about the walls of his home, adorned with Scripture samplers made by his mother and sisters.  Those words inspired and empowered his life’s work.  See the whole article here.

http://act.ucc.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=51961.0&dlv_id=69581

It made me think back to my childhood.  The most prominent wall hanging I can remember is the Jesus painting that always had a place of honor. Christ was always present in my home, if not always in my heart.  In my grandparents’ house, there was a painting that was on the wall directly in front of me when I laid on their sofa in the front room to nap.  It was a small village, a cobblestone lane running at an upward slope between the cottages, and a lady with a basket of flowers.  The colors seemed to shimmer in a way that made the painting come to life.  It sparked my curiosity and imagination – where was she going?  Where had she been?  It was a peaceful scene that made me dream of foreign places.  When I moved to Switzerland, I returned to that village in real time. 

On my walls now – a print that we bought in Tennessee – our Ebenezer print – a reminder that God has and will always help us . A collection of ceramic crosses.  Our degrees and professional certificates – a reminder of happy accomplishments.  A flamingo watercolor painted by a 9-year old Kate – the bright yellow sun always makes me smile. And many more…

My walls say a lot to me.  They speak of the past, a life of blessing, overflowing with family and friends.  They sing of the present, each new day a wellspring of joy.  They call forth a future full of hope and promise.  So F is for feedback.  Feedback can be defined as “a process in which information about the past or the present influences the same phenomenon in the present or future.”  Our physical surroundings of today influence our tomorrow.  What feedback are you getting from your living space, personal and professional?  Take a walk around.  You’ll be living this tomorrow.  Choose your feedback wisely.  You’ll get what you create.

E for Encourage

As I contemplated E words, several sprang to mind this week.
Exasperated – when people didn’t respond to me as quickly as I thought appropriate. 
Expectations – dashed again and again. 
Elevated – heart rate when things didn’t go as I expected. 
Ego – injured when my priority wasn’t acknowledged as another’s primary concern. 
Eager – to blame someone else for my lack of patience.

Enough. Stop my whining.

Engage. Step into my life. 

Energize. Start anew.

Making this reframe possible for me are those in my world who encourage me.  Charlie, most of all. Kate and Jess.  Many friends.  Even strangers.  I am truly blessed to be surrounded by love and encouragement. 

Every day, I have dozens of encounters, each with the potential for me to be the encourager.  Do I take advantage of those opportunities?  Do I build up?  Or tear down?


The word “courage” is from the Latin/Old French for “heart.” Encourage is to put your heart into someone who is downhearted until he or she is lifted up. The beauty of this arrangement is that both parties are nourished in the process.  It’s a true win-win situation.  Encouragement can be as simple as a smile, a nod, a gentle pat on the shoulder.  It can be just one word, a pep talk on the fly, a quick telephone chat, a greeting card, a letter.



To encourage myself to be a better encourager to others, I did a spot check to see how I encourage myself. (That’s a sentence full of encouragement.) Do my refrigerator and cupboard encourage healthy snacking and balanced meals?  Does my office chair encourage good posture?  Does my bed encourage sound rest?  My schedule encourage the lifestyle I want – with time for leisure or study or family or romance or whatever I value?  My shoes encourage solid support for my hardworking feet?  There’s room for improvement, but I’m not doing bad.

Now that’s encouraging!

D for Distance

This week, I’ve had a couple of different conversations about living the expat life.  It requires a different set of skills, one of which, if relationship is something you value, is being able to stay in touch with family and friends despite a geographic separation.
This got me to thinking about - distance.  Hence our D word for this week.

When Charlie and I got our first international assignment, my dad was concerned about keeping in touch – he was a talker (like me) and we typically chatted by phone, at least for a few minutes, every day.  But he feared that international calls would make this cost prohibitive.  Voila!  We introduced him to Skype and he became a Skype-aholic. He’s gone now, but rarely a day passes that I don’t Skype with Mom.  Or Kate.  Or Jessica.  Just this morning, we had a lovely three-way chat about our vacation plans for later this year.

I know what my mom’s pro time was at her latest check-up (if you don’t even know what this is and you have aging parents, ask them).  And what she had for lunch.  That one of her dear friends died this week and another celebrated a milestone birthday.  And that we both still miss Dad and think of him often.  We talk about everything, the big and small things.  Sometimes, the call lasts less than a minute, other times, it meanders close to half an hour or more.  Our relationship is solid.

I see the Littles online and watch them play in their playroom, eat their breakfast, do a new dance.  Thanks to Skype, we were present in the room when Stella was born.  We love the nights we see Kate on Skype with her morning coffee, the day in Arizona just beginning as ours is closing.
I once heard of a family, two siblings and their mother, who lived within a one-mile radius of one another – and went years – yes, years – without  seeing one another.  Distance is not a matter of miles. Don’t believe me?  Ask Einstein.  There’s this thing called the ERP Paradox – when two particles go off in opposite directions, a measurement of one particle still influences the measurement of the other particle.  In other words, we don’t have to be local to be connected.

C for Conversations

C.  Now there’s a letter with a lot of possibility.  

Customer.

Client.

Challenge.

Compromise.

Communication.

Celebration. 

Where to start?

My current reading material is World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations that Matter by Juanita Brown.  So let’s go with CONVERSATION.  Check out the origin of the word.  At its base it means “living together, having dealings with others” and also “a manner of conducting oneself in the world.”

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=conversation

Just how cool is that?  And so counter cultural.  Most of what we have and hear is discussion or debate or diatribe. 

Conversation is different.  It’s about sharing our thoughts, our hopes, our beliefs, in an ongoing dialogue as we create meaning together.  Change the conversation, change your world.

On Trip Advisor, I was reading a reviewer’s comments.  They went something like this: 

“This is truly a lovely place.  Since everyone else has covered all the positives, I’ll point out a few negatives.”

Darn, now there’s changing the conversation for the worst.

Yesterday in the post office, I saw the opposite.  A little girl, restless because of the long queue and getting bored, refused to listen to her mother who was asking her to return to the counter.  As she ran around the counter and began to protest with “nos” that were threatening to get really loud, the mother stooped down, held out her arms, and said “Could I have a kiss?”  The little girl stopped mid-step, cocked her head, and then walked into her mother’s waiting arms.  From there the mother re-directed her attention to a toy and asked if she could take the pieces apart.  From there, the little girl became absorbed in her activities, pulling the stacked stars apart and counting them.

What a lovely moment to observe!  The mother met the little girl on her level, reached out in love to create a bond, starting the dialogue with the end in mind, then waited for her daughter to cement the bond, and then moved their interaction to a totally different level. Well done, Mum!!

Brown writes that “conversation is the core process by which we humans think and coordinate our actions together.” She quotes Lynne Twist, a social entrepreneur, as saying “I believe…that we don’t really live in the world.  We live in the conversation we have about the world…And over that we have absolute, omnipotent power.”

It’s barely noon and I’ve already had two conversations that could have gone better.  I have the power to change that. Do I have the courage? 

 

Conversation.  

Change.

Courage. 

All good C words. 

B for Buoyancy

Everyone seems to be seeking work-life balance.  Google it – I got 191,000,000 results in 0.18 seconds.  But balance assumes an even distribution – half here, half there, a little here, a little there, oops, too much there, so more here.  Balance takes control, effort, and constant monitoring.  But life isn’t always so accommodating.

 My yesterday started out calmly enough, my plans laid out hour by hour.  I had a full list but no worries – I was confident I could get it all done.  We had a bathroom sink clogged and dinner guests coming at 7, but the plumber was to arrive at 3, he’d be long gone before the evening began.  I needed to go out at 5.  It was all going to work like a charm.  Until it didn’t.  At 3:30, his arrival was shifted to 6 and there was a new problem, water dripping from the living room ceiling.  My schedule fell apart.  Fortunately, I did not. 

That’s life.  Things happen.  A customer deal blows up and you need to be on a call at 3 AND you have to be at the dentist at 3 – you’ve canceled twice and this cracked crown isn’t going to let you ignore it much longer.  Or you’ve got a choice of how to spend the last 30 minutes of coherency you have left at the end of a particularly long day – finish your personal taxes, finalize an employee’s performance review that’s due the next day, or call and find out how your mom’s doctor’s appointment went today.  

There’s not a lot of balance.  Some days, work rules.  Okay, most days, work rules.  But that only makes the holidays, the family days, the self-care days that much sweeter.  We’re all doing the best we can, right?

So rather than struggle so hard for this work-life balance illusion, I propose we seek work-life buoyancy.  It has a much nicer feel to it.  Life as a river, always flowing, sometimes smoothly, sometimes swelling up, clear blue or murky gray, and me – a little buoy, bobbing along.  Yes, I’ll be overwhelmed at times, but I will bounce back up, I will continue the journey.  Humpty Dumpty was sitting on a wall, a true balancing act, especially for one of such ungainly proportions, and we all know how that turned out.  Nobody could put him back together again.    

But such will not befall us when we go bob, bob, bobbing along.  And did you know that buoyancy is improved when more of an object’s surface touches the water? Think about being in the water horizontally (more of you touching the surface) or vertically.  It takes much less effort horizontally and when you get positioned just right, it requires no effort.  It seems then the best way to get buoyant is to get fully engaged in the river of life – wholeheartedly, mentally, physically, spiritually – less struggling, more float.

A for Anxiety

As the first weekend of 2013 rolls around, I must admit (and Charlie will confirm) that I have been a crank since getting back to Singapore.  He might say that’s an understatement.  I’ve been edgy, irritable, almost itchy, like there’s something under my skin fighting to get out.  Yes, I have screamed aloud more than once.

I’ve decided it’s beginnings that rattle me.  Endings are easier – there’s something natural about conclusions – all good things must end is conventional wisdom, right? And in endings, the path is more clearly defined.  Beginnings are another matter.  So many possibilities, opportunities, choices.  It’s easy around about September or October to say – hey, next year, I’ll jump right on that.  January gleams safely in the distance, a fresh start glowing with great promise.  And then the New Year arrives, all those resolutions come home to roost and the coop gets pretty chaotic. 

So, in honor of Stella who is obsessed with the alphabet, the first week of 2013 is being sponsored by A for anxiety.  Kierkegaard says that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. What I’m feeling then is just part of being human.  I’m free to choose – that’s the good news and the bad news.  It’s up to me.  It’s up to you.

What to do with this beginning. 

Fear Less, Love More

Some days I zip right by my calendar’s “quote of the day” and think “oh, that’s nice.” Other times, a quote sticks in my head, an ear worm of sorts, and loops back day after day, making me stop and think time and again, often directing my thinking and acting. This one by Eleanor Roosevelt is one of the stickers.

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”

The first time I read it, I dreamed of big things I could do to change the world. Why wasn’t I doing those? Starting up a charity. Writing a novel. Building a business. Something grand. Something huge. Something that proves I am fearless.

(Insert sound effect here – screeching brakes.)

Stop. Read it again. Look fear in the face. Do what I cannot do. What is fear? It has been defined as False Evidence Appearing Real. I think it’s the opposite of love. We live in fear. Or we live in love. Living in love requires fearlessness. We let go of our insecurities, our longings, our neediness. We love the other. Note the full stop at the end of that sentence. We love the other. No conditions.

Of course, we can never do this completely, it is a direction rather than a destination. But what a beautiful journey.

How do we begin? First, we accept that we are loved – by our Heavenly Father. Knowing that we are loved unconditionally and drawing upon that Perfect Limitless Love is the only way to move beyond fear. I am loved. I don’t deserve it, but I am. And so is every other human being. Every traveler I meet along the road is worthy of God’s love. Maybe we can’t love him or her – we all have someone in our life who stretches our limits - but God does love that person. So we pray that His Love be the spark that lights our way. And we remember what Paul told us – that we did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but we have received a spirit of adoption. We’ve been adopted by the Creator of the Universe! God says you’re not just a creature, you are my child. Meditating on that thought makes one fearless.

So back to Eleanor. What if the thing which I cannot do today is to love? What if the greatest fear I have is to accept and love that person who irritates me the most? What happens if I let go of judgment and condemnation, accept him/her as is, just as I am accepted? What if I lay down resentment, bitterness, regret, anger? What if all I have left is love?

The beautiful poet Rilke says it much more eloquently:

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

By God’s grace, we shall do that thing we think we cannot do.  We will do it today.  We will move boldly in the direction of light.  We will love.