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In Identity, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships, Spiritual Life

What is Hard for You?

Julianne HarveyFebruary 2, 2016February 2, 2016Leave a comment

We have a key jar (courtesy of our friends at Momastery) that we pull out at supper. In the key jar are a variety of open-ended questions designed to get us talking about more meaningful subjects. The kids love it and so do I (I’m pretty sure Jason tolerates it).

I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the recent questions Ava drew out and read: What is one thing that’s hard for you? A few of the answers around the table were “patience”, “being wrong” and “trying new things”. I said, “Watching people do stupid, mean or irresponsible things and not getting involved.”

Asking ourselves this question, “What is hard for you?” helps us get at our blind spots; those areas of weakness we paper over and pretend they aren’t there. Denial is a powerful force. It protects us from pain, but it also keeps us a prisoner of our own bullshit, making it impossible to move forward unless we summon enough courage to face it.

Letting air and light on our greatest areas of shame give us an invitation to grow. We begin to see where improvement is needed and this helps us outline what to work on in our daily lives. For me, I must practice letting go of any misguided notions of control. It’s egotistical for me to assume I know what’s best for someone else. I simply do not have that kind of reach, power or influence.

I must learn to stop obsessing or worrying about what other people are doing. It’s none of my business. If I am asked to help, I can decide at that point if I want to offer assistance. But if I am not asked (which is most of the time), I do not need to trouble myself with any swirling drama, chaos or fall-out from the life choices of other people.

It seems freeing to state it like that – a marvel of healthy boundaries. It’s not so clear-cut or easy to carry out in regular life. I get angry too fast over perceived injustices, frustrating parenting examples, a stranger’s rudeness in a store. Perhaps the only thing I can do is take a long, deep breath and clarify again that I am not the moral conscience of the universe.

As the recovery movement so succinctly declares: Let it begin with me. I must be the change I wish to see in the world. It’s obnoxious for me to tell other people what they are doing wrong, for after all, this is only my opinion and therefore highly subjective.

I rarely tell people how much they annoy me, which I can slot in the “win” column. But I lose too much of my energy, joy and peace thinking about situations that are not my direct responsibility. Bringing this up at dinner has clarified the need for me to put effort into this area.

Strengthening my boundaries is a worthwhile goal, so I can focus on my own priorities instead of worrying about messes and problems I had no hand in creating. Bringing these buried and dusty weaknesses to the light is a painful process, but it gives us a road map to follow when it comes to our own emotional health.

How about you? What is one thing that is hard for you?

In Identity, Personal Growth, Relationships, Writing

The Shift

Julianne HarveyJanuary 19, 2016January 17, 2016Leave a comment

When a shift in how we understand something happens, it’s often unsettling. It’s a private thing, especially at first, because it takes time to understand what’s changed and until we get clearer, we find it hard to talk about it.

This is a normal part of change, but I really do hate it. I’m trying to come to terms with that off-putting sensation of not quite belonging anywhere. I feel like I’m at odds with myself when I’m sorting through these rough patches. The work is all internal and therefore not easy to categorize or understand, and so a certain loneliness tinges the entire process.

I love the epiphany itself and I’ve been through this enough to know that the eventual result will be worth it. But that damn middle section is a huge pain.

It helps to realize that privately nurturing these small seeds of growth is both valuable and important. It’s part of the process. The challenging bit is seeing the world in a different way, but still living as if the epiphany hadn’t occurred. It requires patience to manage these shifts in understanding. We have to be gentle with ourselves, the way we would treat a child going through a major transition.

I get trapped up in the middle sections of change. I feel lost, bereft, alone. It’s easy to feel misunderstood, like the ground is no longer solid under your feet but it’s not quite clear where your next step should take you.

I know that something big is happening for me in these uncertain places. I’ve been here before and I’m certain I’ll be here again. Anyone willing to risk by growing and changing will feel some of this unsettled discomfort. It’s the stretch before the new thing fully reveals itself. It gets dark in this unfamiliar terrain, with accusing doubts whispered into your ear. “Who are you to try for this? No one else thinks this is a good idea! If this was so great, more people would be on board.”

When we make decisions based on what other people might say, we are sunk before we get moving. It’s a losing game, and I know this, but far too often I start to play it when the doubts get loud. The key is to stay the course, to allow the passion to ignite into flame, to tamp down the fear and keep putting one foot in front of the other.

It’s okay to be the only one who initially believes in something. The rest of the world is busy with their own stuff. If it brings life to your soul and hope to your spirit, pursue it. Make your way bravely through the middle ground of the shift. Fight the insecurity and the doubt. Emerge on the other side, into the sun, knowing that you will never be the same. That alone is enough reward.

In Identity, Personal Growth, Relationships

The Gift of Uncertainty

Julianne HarveyNovember 24, 2015November 16, 2015Leave a comment

Walking the thin line between uncertainty and planning is a killer. For those aggressive Type A personalities out there, like myself, you just want to KNOW, dammit, so you can confidently head in a specific direction.

Places of uncertainty stretch us, like Gumby (for those of you too young for this reference, Gumby was a green 80s figure pliable enough to bend into various poses). It’s uncomfortable. It’s awkward. It can really, really blow, because it asks us to live in the now; to give our undivided attention to this moment.

Uncertainty reminds us that we are not in control of everything. It invites us to trust: in timing, in goodness, in an invisible safety net that we hope is there even if we can’t prove it.

On the plus side, not knowing what the outcome will be sharpens our senses. It’s like going to the optometrist and marvelling at how crisp those letters can be with the right prescription. We suddenly notice what we’ve long taken for granted, because something has shifted in us and we know that nothing in this life stays the same forever. We change, and so do the people around us. Circumstances shift, children grow up, the snow comes to end the autumn.

Once again, this comes down to surrender. As the brilliant Cheryl Strayed writes, “Acceptance is a small, quiet room.” When we choose to give up our right to know what will happen, we turn our soul loose on this present moment and space, believing that we are enough for whatever challenges and triumphs are coming.

We can’t see them, and we must come to terms with that. We all have limits. Twenty-four hour days, three-hundred and sixty-five day years, one mortal body we cannot exchange or upgrade, an enormous world that we can only make our home in one minuscule part of.

But our spirit is limitless. It can soar, dream, expand, transform. We have external limits, but no internal ones – except for what we impose on ourselves. Every so often we discover a fresh perspective, renewed gratitude, a surge of optimism. We stretch. We feel pulled by what we cannot anticipate, manipulate, or control. But when we get through that, we are different.

The key is not to break faith with the process. To believe that something wonderful might be around the corner, slightly beyond what we can see, instead of fearing a dark and scary experience. Staying anchored to the now helps us believe in a better future, because we are fully alive. Equally surrendering our fierce grip on the past and the future offers us peace for today. And that equips us for whatever is coming.

In Books, Personal Growth, Writing

How You Do Anything

Julianne HarveySeptember 29, 2015September 28, 2015Leave a comment

In last week’s RobCast, This Episode is Sugar Free, the brilliant Rob Bell quotes Dan Klein who says, “How you do anything is how you do everything.” I can’t seem to get this statement out of my brain. It’s whirring gently in there, like a washer on a spin cycle.

The little things matter in this life. It’s a cliche to say that they add up to be the big things, but it really is true. It’s not healthy to focus on the “everything” because it’s so big, and often out of our direct control. But the “anything”? This amounts to the daily choices we make, the small moments, the one-on-one interactions.

How you do anything is how you do everything. I’m trying to pull the focus of my life’s camera lens back, to tighten it on what’s in front of me at any given time. We can’t build the big structure until we learn to hammer a single nail. It’s wishful thinking to get ahead of ourselves by imagining the finished product before we complete the thousand tiny steps we need to do to get there.

How are you spending your time? Is your dreaming outpacing the work you are doing? For years, I lived this way. I felt resentful when other people succeeded at something I longed to do, but my energy went into fantasizing about the end goal instead of plugging away at the hard work of completing one task after another. What right did I have to begrudge someone who was actually putting in blood, sweat and tears, when I was only dreaming?

Of course, it’s fine to have a vision and to daydream about the big score. But doing only that focuses on the everything without actually doing the anything required to see your dream become a reality. No one succeeds without effort, failure, resilience, courage and time. These ingredients are required. Big projects have a ton of small steps, peppered with setbacks. Most of the time we just don’t get to see them.

We hold a finished book in our hands, listen to a terrific new album, or walk into a stunning building. We don’t know all of the individual days, months and years of effort that went into these things, so it can be easy to fool ourselves about the project. If the person or team got to the “everything” that you read, listen to or look at, they learned how to master each individual piece of “anything” that built up to the final product.

Every step matters. I’m paying closer attention now to my anythings because without each one, I wouldn’t ever reach my longed-for everything. Inch by inch, we grow and change and develop, and all of it counts.

In Books, Identity, Parenting, Personal Growth

The Gift of an Ordinary Day

Julianne HarveySeptember 1, 2015September 1, 2015Leave a comment

In my ongoing literary agent research, I came across a recommendation for a motherhood memoir called The Gift of an Ordinary Day, by Katrina Kenison. I just finished it, savouring the last fifty pages like a gourmet meal I didn’t ever want to end, and I feel profoundly stirred by Kenison’s heartrending observations on letting go of our beloved children.

The Gift of an Ordinary Day details her family’s journey to build a house as their two sons are reaching adolescence and growing away from their parents. It’s a familiar story of loss and change; a road I have yet to travel with my own children but can already sense, heavy in my bone marrow, for one day this metamorphosis from dependent to independent happens to all of us.

And what better time to face up to this fact than right now, the beginning of September, with the challenges and demands of a new school year upon us? We cannot freeze-frame the lives of our children, any more than we can halt the steady march of time for ourselves. The entire process of life itself is moving on: changing, dying, transforming. Nothing is static. Accepting this is better than fighting it.

But sometimes it hurts. We feel a deep ache, in the centre of our being, at just how fast our children are growing. We empty out drawers of pants that are too short and socks that no longer fit. We place pencil marks on closet doors until they are taller than we are. We love them at every stage, but we cannot hold them there. We must learn to let them go. It’s the hardest work there is as the mothers who fed them, rocked them, guided and nurtured them, until they have learned to do all of these things for themselves.

Tomorrow Ava begins grade 7 and William starts grade 4. We celebrate these milestones together, but privately I also mourn the ages that are now behind us, stored only in our memories. Parenting is one long lesson in letting go. It’s about transition, adaptation, surrender. Being a mother means loving with our whole heart, a process that opens us up to feel terrible pain and loss.

When we do our job well, raising kids who contribute positively to society and know how to look after themselves, by definition this means they will one day leave us to make their own way in the world. Each step they take in these school years is a step further from our warm, encompassing care. This is what we signed up for by having kids, but it’s important to acknowledge our own feelings around this process.

I’m so grateful to Katrina Kenison for holding up a light for me as I navigate the path of my daughter’s newfound adolescence. I do not want to overlook the beauty, healing and transformation available in each and every ordinary day to come.