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Be Here Now, Contd.
I wrote “Be Here Now” (6/7/10) in an earnest attempt at speaking to the convoluted coping mechanisms that we attempt to manage our feelings. Questions force me to further clarify: any time we try to force-stop an experience, for whatever reason, we force-stop all experiences. My belief is that stopping the fully developed experience of pain – ultimately stops the fully developed experience of joy. Stopped experiences clog everything – not just the experience we want to stop.
My point about joy, is that we never wish to stop joy and so we dive fully into this experience with abandon – that is why joy occurs so quickly in comparison to pain. That does not mean that joy fully experienced eludes us. Indeed, if we are capable of “being here now” nothing could be further from the truth… Joy envelopes us, when the experience is available. The experience can only be fully available if we can be present in the moment, without the shadow of our pain lingering over us or with us.
Truly, that is the point about being here now, being fully present for whatever moment that comes upon us. It is a child-like state of being. Recently, my granddaughter had her awards ceremony for first graders. It was a highly anticipated occasion, as my granddaughter had worked all year to be the best. She had earned awards for good behavior and for good grades. The ceremony was to take place at 9:00 a.m. and you can imagine for a 7 year old, getting ready for the ceremony, waiting in line, sitting in the auditorium, waiting for the rest of the school and sitting in the auditorium – lots of feelings boiled to the surface. Like a cadre of highly trained and dedicated parents we swooped down on her en masse: her father, her mother, her grandmother and her uncle. She began weeping earnestly, so deep was her fear of being abandoned to the busy-ness of our lives. As she was comforted, her joy at our attention and presence overcame her. Happiness swept over her tear-stained face quickly, to replace all of the fear that had preceded it. Throughout the ceremony, she laughed and waved at us and giggled. Such is the power of being here now – all that is in the moment must be experienced so that the moment can fully develop into all that is joyful and beautiful about life. These moments can linger, all of them, where ever they come from, they carry us or thwart us in the next moment. It is our choice.
And as my granddaughter would say “trust me”: fully experiencing what is here now, being in the moment, no matter what the moment is offering to us, is a way of being – that fully enriches life now.
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Any Poor Performer who goes Un-checked is a Staff Morale Killer
Any supervisor / manager is going to have a range of performers to deal with. The worst of the worst but, if we are lucky, the best of the best as well. Some performers are internally motivated and some are externally motivated. Folks with an internal locus of control are great if they are high performers, not so great if they are low performers. Research indicates that those with an internal locus of control tend to do better at work than those with an external locus of control (caveats, etc). The point is that workers are as wildly unique as people are and it’s important to realize that any manager will have both poor performers and great performers. How you manage them is directly related to your ability to reach the goals of the organization.I’ve seen it alot, particularly in bureaucracies, and in my field of human service agencies where bureaucracy runs rampant. There is often a culture with entrenched staff of “job entitlement”. If you speak with these staff members you will quickly see that they have a sense that they have a “right” to their job. Much has been written about the foibles of management, little has been written about the tyranny of “entitled” staff. They are a group of people who are not accountable and they have lots of justification for it. They’ve been around “for years”. At one time, they may have even performed their job, but that time is long past.
Like a marriage that is grounded in co-dependence and ugly behavior, the supervisor of the entitled staff has long since resigned herself to the apathy that runs rampant in her department. Senior executives are too wound up in their own agenda to look into what is occurring at the line staff level. The next mistake is when the senior executive is making comments about what is wrong with “that department.” Any time a manager distances himself from his subordinates, s/he is making a perception mistake. Subordinates are only a mirror of the manager. Any department, no matter how far down the food chain they operate, reflects the attitudes and behavior of the CEO. There is no “that” department. There is no “those staff”, there is no “other” in management. When I hear that language in a management meeting, I know that the manager is distancing himself in order to avoid dealing with the poor performers.
When I see or hear a manager complaining about the performance of subordinates, I am immediately aware of their lack of insight into the real problem. Yet this is an attitude that encourages poor performance and the tyranny of the entitled. As the staff suffers through the indifference and distance of supervisors and executive staff, it is easy for line staff to justify low performance and so they do.
The price an organization pays is a huge one. This is why: the high performers will leave, they constitute the “revolving door” that HR complains about. When this is happening, then you know that the organization is completely upside down. The revolving door should be designed and utilized for poor performers only. An organization’s goal must always be to retain the high performers so that products get out the door in a high quality manner. When the “entitled” stay and there is a string of high performers rushing for the exit door, the organization needs to take note and look to the TOP. Consequences of ignoring the “tyranny of the entitled” are dire. In this lean and mean time, it is a mistake that cannot be made.
So if you work in a place like this, where the tyranny of low performance is killing off what is good and honest and bright: recall those quotes from the New York Times: “When 40 million people believe in a dumb idea, it’s still a dumb idea”, so if you are someone who believes in something honest and bright, stick to it “maybe your peers will get smart and drift your way.” And if you are a manager here, then you need to make changes before dire becomes done.
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How I Experience Love…
I feel love like a warm blanket that keeps me from the cold of the world. Because while the universe is warm, abundant, loving and giving, the world is not. The world is cold, unyielding and unforgiving. Love is of the universe and it feels warm, it yields to me and forgives me my foibles.When I lose love, because I have lost a relationship, I am colder for it. I may not have wanted the relationship, I may not have enjoyed the relationship, but still it is cold without the love of the relationship to cover me. Love is like a constant companion, someone can be shouting at me and inside I will say to myself “my sister loves me, even if you do not”. So I keep my love around me and in my mind to blanket me with the warmth of being wanted, forgiven and regarded.
Throughout my precarious youth I kept my mother’s love like a shield against all hardship. I could feel her love – it lived and breathed within me and I thought I must be safe with myself in order to regard her love. Her death was the coldest and meanest of all. Like the manic winter of Virginia (as I have been nowhere else with snow) the cold bit into me deeply.
And so I feel about love and relationships that love is necessary, but not sufficient to keep a relationship alive. I may have to give up love to leave a relationship and that is the hardest task of all. I know that I will be cold and I remember the cold of my mother’s passing and it makes me frightened. But I also know that some relationships will not survive the bitterness of the world.
There is much dodging and dancing to keep the warmth of love around me and this is not the way that I wish to experience it. I wish to have in my relationship, the kind of love that my mother provided me with: A warm blanket that stays with me no matter what: A love that I never have to leave and that I do not have to fear. If you have this love it is easy to forget the cold, but I tell you that you should not, because love is a very powerful gift. It is a gift that you can keep forever, even if it is only in your memory.
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Positive Affirmations are Not Enough
This is a sentence used quite often in current psychology writings. Big discovery! Truth is, it is not a big or a current discovery. True counselors and therapists, the ones who deal with the heartache, grief and pain of the human condition have always known this. There is no mystery here, there is no newsflash here.True hurt, grief, pain and despair must be experienced in order to be released. Therapists and counselors understand this. Positive affirmations are positive support from self to self, to deal with the negative beliefs that come to be with painful experiences. A counselor / therapist uses their own positive regard for the client to support the client through the moment. The positive affirmations go home with the client and help to continue the support throughout the week.
This is why I say we must embrace positive affirmations. They are part of what we need to rebuild what is damaged by our resistance to our experience (pain and grief) and our concomitant inappropriate belief structures. Positive affirmations can put us back on the path to healing and loving ourselves and others.
So don’t talk trash about positive affirmations, of course they are not enough. Knowledgeable therapists and counselors have always known this. Positive affirmations are not trite tricks of the trade either. Positive affirmations can be tools that we apply to show support and love for ourself. When we are healing from a great hurt or grieving a loss, isn’t any source of support and love a good one? If that love and support comes from self, isn’t that even better?
So, geez, don’t put down positive affirmations, well – don’t put down anything. Positive affirmations can be indicators for self support and self love and what’s the harm in that?
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Be Here Now
Experiencing our lives from moment to moment in an alive and conscious way is the only way to have integrity with ourselves. If we allow our belief systems to encumber the moment, we will stymie our experience and thus stop the experience.True hurt must be experienced to be released. It is our unhinged coping mechanisms that keep us from experiencing our true experience. Why? Well, we all resist the pain of life, hoping for and always pursuing the happiness and the joy. Without the pain of life, happiness and joy eludes us, something to be forever chased that we cannot catch because we are unwilling to have our experience.
The fact of the matter is that once you are willing to HAVE your experience, what will bubble up, will bubble up – it is not within our control. This is what scares us. Many of us store our grief and sadness, hurt and rage for years. When we finally make the choice to experience ourselves, it can be overwhelming, as all of those feelings have festered “under our skin” into an infection that weakens us. As the hurts pile up, they become more entrenched and more powerful.
This process of storing our grief and sadness changes our thought process. We lose our child like openness and trade it for the defense mechanisms and protective belief structures that will interfere with our ability to experience our lives. It is almost an oxy-moronic thought process, because the truth is, that “What you resist; persists”. Hurt, despair and grief unattended to is still hurt, despair and grief. Only through our experience of them are we able to release them and through release, we can go on to the next emotion of our experience. Joy is always brief, because we are almost always willing to experience it; that is why it goes away. Any emotion experienced, moves on, any emotion that is stuck, serves as the plug which keeps us from experiencing anything, including the joy that is available to us.
So be here now, it may take some work to get here, but it is well worth the experience. Life brings us everything, including joy, love, connectedness and happiness. It is up to you to “have” it.
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Words
There are two times in a relationship when you need no words, in the beginning when hot romance and lusty touches are all that you need and then at the end when nothing you say will make any difference whatsoever at all.
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The Point
I’m amazed by my children’s reverence for me. All I have really ever done is love them intensely, and while I think that being loved is a very great thing, I’ve never had any choice about loving them. It came naturally, it had it’s own strength, it had it’s own life. So there is a part of me that feels rewarded – for no effort on my part – I never had any choice about loving my kids. It just is. I am thinking about all of this because in the last month, I have received great warmth and support from them. They have managed my life very well. It is interesting how they will trade responsibility for me around. One takes over when there is physical work to do, one takes the lead when there is emotional work to do, one does a lot of nurturing, and medical is yet another facet of mom-management.Who talks to me, when, where and why, may be the result of a family council meeting that I was not invited to. To be revered and yet “managed” is an interesting experience and can only come from your kids – there is no other place where these unique experiences are formed and then collide.
I have been thinking about why I started this blog…
It really started because in the “push me pull you” conflict of burgeoning young adulthood, I always felt that there was one more thing that I needed to either tell my kids or explain to my kids before they left the safety of home. Now, mind you, this dilemma of mine has been going on for 18 years – I mean Russ is 36. It’s been awhile since the first of my many flew-the-coop. What they taught me as they teetered through their twenties, is that parenting is never a done job. Gradually the fear that I had not taught them enough was replaced by a fear that I could never teach enough – through the end of time. And trust me, I don’t believe that I know the secret to life, I just believe that a concept learned must be shared.
I had to write, hence the blog and the attempt at completing all of life’s lessons for my brood. The blog gets shaky in purpose at times, and the point is sometimes lost to urgent matters of life, like health and love and romance. But in the end, it is always really about them and my need – to not lose the lesson. My family is a hard-headed bunch who prefers experience to wisdom. Shake that up with this mysterious phenomena of a wildly different personality with each birth and you have no real constructive way to help others with lessons of life. In fact, each life lesson is different for each personality. You can be hammering away on intellectual development and that is not what child number two needs, child number one needed that.
So, there is some innate sense and depth of failure inherent in the process of parenting. One can never tell what issue will face your child. Then you add the confounder that each personality will handle the issue differently and you really have some confusion – or at least I do. (Geez, on some days, I can’t even get their names right.) Is this a self esteem issue, or is this pride, or is this insight, or is it heartbreak? How do I respond, what if I lose this moment, this chance at wisdom given, shared?
So here I am with my blog. Reading has always had a profound influence on my life and I can say that each of my life’s transitions were shepherded by meaningful works shared by people who – like me – had to write. I am incredibly grateful to all of those folks who had to share by writing and I am incredibly grateful to be able to write.
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You Don’t Deserve to be With Other People,
If you are unhappy and mean.
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No Breathing Spark of Illumination
I go into surgery this week – and that fact – of all things, has me feeling lonely. So when Lisa said “Do you have anyone to go with you?” I almost cried in relief because I said “no” and she said “I will take you”. Lisa is my ghetto babe and she calls me Mama. She has been there for me more times than I can count and of course, I have never felt adequate to that.I know that my family loves me, but I know that this is not a chore for my children. Johanna (who is 824 miles away from me) texts me “Mom I’m really worried about you! I feel like you aren’t being a hundred % honest with me and I know it’s because u don’t want us to worry. But I’m literally having stomach aches over it! I can’t loose you and it kills me to think you’re in pain or something’s hurting you! Please be honest with me about what’s going on and let me know when and what’s happening! Maybe these stomach aches will go away! I love u more than words will ever describe! You are not finished here and have many things to do and see happy and healthy! Take care of yourself mama!”
Haven’t really processed through this situation, and it is true that I lied to the kids about the biopsy. But I remember sitting in the Doctor’s office and thinking “No, God would never do that, I am the last one living in my kids life, of course I will live for a long time – God would never take my kids only parent away from them.” It just doesn’t seem plausible, doesn’t make sense. I keep going over it in my head. How did we get here? I mean as a family, what the hell happened? Plain and simple, everyone died. Until I was 37, 15 short / long years ago, I was surrounded by parents – I had 5 of them! I had a husband, a father to my children. It’s true our marriage didn’t make it, but we kept up the parenting always. We were partners in crime when the kids misbehaved; we would plot and manipulate to stay on the same page to discipline and to love. And now gone, all of them gone, and I am left standing alone. Normally I am fierce, I can be cruel, I can be endlessly strong.
But now, as I face this betrayal of my body, I weaken, I cry, God forbid, I’m a sissy. I can’t stand sissies.
