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In Culture, Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth

When Worried, We Have Two Choices

Julianne HarveyNovember 8, 2016November 7, 2016Leave a comment

Like most people, I’m concerned about the U.S. election today. But I’m over worrying about the things I cannot control. I’ve wasted too much time on that already.

When something is worrying us, we have two choices. We can stew and obsess and forecast disaster. Or we can intentionally choose to hope that it’s all going to work out the way it’s meant to. Probably not the way we would design it, but we only have a portion of the information we need at any given time. In order to see the whole picture, we have to simply keep going to see what’s next.

This summer I decided to live in the now instead of the future or the past. It was easier to do this when I was sick in the hospital and recovering at home, because my whole world shrank down to the next hour in front of me. I could not make any plans for anything beyond that.

Once I accepted this reality, everything got easier, simpler and clearer. Planning for the next hour makes more sense than the next month, year or decade. But when I recovered from my ruptured appendix and we were suddenly moving to BC and dealing with massive change, my commitment to staying in the present was put to the test.

And I failed, more often than not. Lately I’m stuck in the past, longing for the comforts of the life we had built for ten years in Alberta: predictable, safe, reliable. Our new existence in the lower mainland is the opposite, but I know this is a temporary instability.

So I’m back to the two choices when I’m worried. Stew and obsess or hope it’s all going to work out. My fallback is always number one, but I can work at this and choose a better option for my mental health.

At the end of 2015 I picked three words to focus on for the new year: strong, clear, optimistic. I’m reminded of these now when I feel weak, muddled, hopeless. We can all do hard things. We can make it through the challenges we face on a daily basis. We can choose optimism over despair.

No matter what happens tonight with the election, I’m not going to allow it to steal any more of my peace and contentment. I’m going to love myself through the change in the U.S. government the way I must love myself through every other obstacle that arises.

It’s all going to be okay. It’s going to work out like it’s supposed to. Believing this can be challenging, but it’s preferable to the fetal position where we are too afraid to continue. Let’s put our fear aside and trust in God, the universe, goodness, ourselves.

Let’s believe that something bigger is going on here than we can piece together with our own perspective. When all of the pieces are eventually revealed, our individual lives will make more sense, to us and to others. For now what we need is optimism, teamwork and kindness. We can get through this together.

In Culture, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Uncertainty

Julianne HarveyAugust 23, 2016August 22, 2016Leave a comment

Uncertainty is a part of life for everyone. We can defend ourselves against it, using strategies such as denial, manipulation and over-confidence in our ability to control outcomes, but at the end of the day the result is the same: uncertainty is always a factor.

I’m a Type A personality, so I find uncertainty to be an uncomfortable bedfellow. And yet as I practice going with the stream and not against it, I discover a fresh source of peace and contentment. When I believed I was the centre of the universe, by squeezing my eyes shut and willing certain things to occur, I felt more in control of my circumstances. But I paid a high price in stress for this make-believe certainty.

It was never real. Not then, not now. It’s the equivalent of a toddler standing in the middle of the room with her chubby hands pressed against her eye sockets, shouting, “You can’t see me!” I’m embarrassed to say I lived more than three decades of my life with this as a worldview. But the older I get, the clearer my uncertainty becomes.

I’m more certain now in my uncertainty than I ever was in my certainty. I’ve said that before and I’m sure I’ll state it many more times before I’m through. The sheer relief of admitting out loud that I don’t have the answers and I never really did is liberating. It’s the bubbles in a freshly-poured glass of Prosecco. It’s the helium that allows you to soar above your surroundings and see the bigger picture.

Uncertainty means you need faith on a daily basis. It requires you to let go of your preconceived ideas about how any experience or relationship should go and invites you to surrender to what is and not what you want it to be. Living this way allows you to recognize that you are one part of this world and not the whole shebang. You play a small but valuable role but huge amounts of this life are above and beyond what you can influence or manage. And this is more than okay.

I am practicing staying in each moment I am in. I don’t allow myself to forecast far into the future any more, for too much will shift and change and I’ll be forced to re-evaluate anyway. So I may as well just decide once, when the moment is upon me, instead of having fifty outcomes mapped out. It simply takes too much energy to live that way.

If you need permission not to have all the answers, please accept this from me. You are not the world’s Wikipedia. As Rumi said, “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” We are marvellously complete, all on our own, but we must live this life to the best of our ability day by day. We don’t have to see around every upcoming bend, simply because we cannot. The job is too big and we are defeated before we begin.

It’s lovely in some ways to live in this age of instant information, but it messes with our natural rhythms. We aren’t sages or fortune tellers. We aren’t certain of what is coming. What we do have is our natural intuition, our sense of humour, our huge, warm hearts that can love without measure. We don’t have certainty of what will happen next or a set prescription for how others should behave.

We are responsible for ourselves and for our dependent children. We can let the rest slide from our shoulders. We can walk away from the drama and the fears of others that spread like wildfire if we let them. We can learn to live with uncertainty; to talk ourselves through it the way we get our kids through difficult situations. By breathing, discussing it in a calm manner, eating a bowl of chips or some chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

Uncertainty is part of life. We may as well embrace it instead of fighting it.

In Identity, Minimalism, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Laser Focus

Julianne HarveyAugust 12, 2016Leave a comment

An interesting thing has happened since my appendix ruptured two weeks ago: I’ve developed laser focus. Before I got so sick and spent a week in the hospital recovering from post-surgery complications, I would look at my life with a long-range lens; fretting over this or that and always planning way out into the future.

Laying in a hospital bed alone changes all that. You are poked and prodded at all hours of the day and night. You fight for your very dignity as a human being, grateful beyond measure for the kindness of specific nurses and doctors. Your illusions of control melt away, water under the bridge of your own failing competence.

I learned in the hospital to take my recovery minute by minute. I’m not throwing up violently at this second? That’s a win. Five days of an awful NG tube, rubbing my throat and nose raw and meaning I can’t eat or drink until every vile, trapped thing in my stomach is vacuumed out so my nausea abates? The morning the doctors finally say it can be removed, I cry with the kind of joy I thought was only reserved for my wedding day or the births of my two children.

Life is chock full of wins and losses. Ups and downs. Strengths and weaknesses. In these last two weeks, arguably the most challenging of my life so far, my line of vision has become intensely small. Focused and specific, instead of generalized and broad.

When you don’t eat or drink for 7 days, that first taste of apple juice is the greatest sensation on earth. That spoonful of vanilla pudding that doesn’t come immediately back up. The Arrowroot baby cookie, consumed at 2 am in the milky darkness of the acute care ward with soft snores of other patients filling the air around you, was like the finest of gourmet meals to me.

My senses are awake again. Thoughts of digestion and standing up to get more water and planning out my next snack consume my day. I don’t kiss my children while thinking about my to-do list any more. Now they are so precious, standing in front of me in their summer pajamas with their hair wet from a shower, and they deserve every ounce of my attention and focus.

How many times have I heard the saying, “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything”? I truly didn’t understand it before, but I do now. I was a person who needed to learn to slow down, and I don’t do anything by half measures. I have been brought low by this burst appendix, the “lazy bowel” that followed surgery, then the large blood clot in my wrist from my last IV once I returned home.

Each challenge must be faced in turn. Everything else falls away. The big picture shrinks to the next hour: what I will eat, if I’m sleepy enough to have a nap, what do the kids need. I’ve learned that this is more than enough. My gratitude rises, as if on a float, to the level I allow for it. My blessings, in the form of family and friends, the ones you can really count on, become crystal clear.

The rest fades away. It truly does not matter. I am changed, from the inside out, from this hard-scrabble season of pain and struggle. I am enough for this challenge and the ones that are sure to come after it. I can endure the toughest experiences and so can you. I’m not interested in fixating on some pre-set idea of success in some far-away future anymore. What I have is this day, this moment, these people; this ballooning, expanding, growing love inside me that spreads into every corner of my small but significant world.

In Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships

Help is the Sunny Side of Control

Julianne HarveyJune 28, 2016June 28, 2016Leave a comment

“No one mentioned until I was in late middle age that – horribly! – my good, helpful ideas for other grown-ups were not helpful. That my help was in fact sometimes toxic. That people needed to defend themselves from my passionate belief that I had good ideas for other people’s lives.

I did not know that help is the sunny side of control.”

This beautiful quote is from the great Anne Lamott’s Facebook page. When I read it, something vital and primal leaped to recognition in my own soul, like a light switch being turned on to illuminate a dark space.

In this life, we have to experience an idea to fully understand it. We must inhabit it by walking it out. Simply thinking through it is not enough to change us. We need to taste it, grapple with it, fight it and then eventually surrender to it.

I did not know that help is the sunny side of control. This tidy phrase encapsulates what I’ve been wrestling with for several years now. I feel like I’m finally ready to accept this bold truth: when help is mostly about me and what I want the other person to do in return, it is not actually help. It’s manipulation, expectation, control.

Learning to face ourselves honestly is a lifelong process. It’s far too horrifying to do all at once. We must take it in tiny stages, lest we be blinded by the outrageous shame of our dysfunction.

If you grew up like I did, help was not free. It was a transaction. For a people pleaser, this meant confusion and anger a lot of the time, because there were no words around this. The system was built on glances, silences, tense body language, raised voices, narrowed eyes and other not-so-subtle clues. You picked your way through this minefield, hoping not to be blown up while trying to earn love and gold stars from others by being so good and helpful that you ached from it.

I learned to control by offering help, while refusing it from others so I wouldn’t owe anyone and they would all owe me. Perhaps not so sunny, but true nonetheless.

Now I practice offering help with no strings attached. It’s new and radical. It’s also hard. I push myself to receive help, support and care from others without feeling that I must repay a silent debt. Unspooling these complex, dysfunctional behaviours is a lengthy job. I must remember that it’s okay to go slow. Many people never even try to face their unvarnished souls – it’s simply too shocking and painful.

Progress towards health is preferable to remaining in denial and darkness. I yearn for light, for beauty, for healing, for restoration. True help is freely given, not bartered for something else or held over another’s head as a ransom demand. That is control. Just because I grew up with that doesn’t mean I can’t change these patterns for my children and for the last half of my life.

I know there is a better way because I’ve seen it in action and felt its warmth on my skin. Love does not demand to be noticed. It is offered with no guarantee it will be returned. I’m going to lean in to this truth, to wear it like a coat and see where it will take me.

In Personal Growth, Relationships

Safe in the Moment

Julianne HarveyFebruary 9, 2016February 8, 2016Leave a comment

When I’m afraid, it helps to follow the advice I regularly give to my son William when he begins a panic attack: breathe slowly, bring yourself back to your body, stay in the present moment, repeat to yourself, “I am safe.”

Most of what worries us lives either in the future or the past. It’s fear over a potential outcome that might never materialize or regret over something already done. If we make an effort to exist in the present moment, with all of its attendant feelings, sensations and realities, we have a better chance of staying calm and collected.

The question I’m trying to ask myself is: what is under my actual control? We all know that our response to any situation is completely up to us, but practicing this while under stress is still challenging. Our minds nose way down the road, anticipating poverty, relationship conflict, uncertainty, loneliness. It’s easy to become overwhelmed.

The key is to bring my focus back to the present moment. To breathe. To imagine myself as safe, cared for, loved…as I can provide these things for myself. Prepping for doomsday scenarios only increases the chaotic sense of panic. Whatever comes, each one of us will have no choice but to deal with it.

Imagining stress is optional, facing reality is not. We are better off working to remain calm and stable, so we are in a more secure mental space to handle misfortune if it should arrive. And it helps to remember that most of what we worry about never actually happens.

Good things are just as likely to occur as horrible ones. Most of our problems originate in our minds, because we long for a specific outcome and anything other than that brings us grave disappointment and loss, even if it was only a vague possibility instead of an actual reality. Damn this internal pessimism of mine, this infernal waiting for the other shoe to drop which ruins even the happiest of days.

I should know by now that the doom and gloom I forecast usually disappears with time. If I allow a little light and air on it, I’ll watch it vaporize. Old habits like shame, depression and fear roar back into life if we let them, for they’ve worn a deep, familiar groove in our subconscious. I have healthier skills available to me, such as trust in myself and others, a newly-kindled optimism, the ability to set a long-term goal and work patiently at reaching it.

Where it all falls apart is the intersection with other people, for I cannot control what others do and say. But I am not responsible for the actions of other people. I must simply observe what they do (or fail to do) and then respond in the healthiest way I can. The stress of others does not have to become my reality. Only if I let it. I can come up with a happier strategy. The critical thing is to be clear on what’s mine and what isn’t – a lifelong struggle for me but one I have to keep working on.