Gut Check

So much for that Tues/Friday blogging schedule, eh?

I'm still committed to it, despite the fact that some nasty gut bacteria and/or pesticide invaded my intestines over the last week.  Not to over-share any details, as I'm sure you can imagine what "gut parasite" might amount to, but suffice it to say I've had a heavy dose of suffering, and of uncertainty.

Yesterday, after a few days of intestinal misery, I started to falter emotionally.  The question of WHAT THE HELL! could possibly be wrong with me began to loom very large, and I managed to think myself into some pretty dark places.  I lost any real sense of perspective, and devolved into incredibly implausible worst-case scenarios that ended in pain, suffering and death.

I'm generally not a hypochondriac, but five days on a toilet will do that to a guy.

As I have mentioned before, I'm a father of two.  And in the midst of my perspective-less sufferfest, I was filled with a nearly unbearable sadness as I held them.  I couldn't imagine not being there for them, to not be able to support them and love them through their growth and development into full-fledged adult humans.  I was in a hole, because the more I tried to convince myself that of course I am being rediculous and overreacting, the more I was confronted with the reality that of course I am not in any way guaranteed to see them into adulthood.  That simply is not how life works.  So the sadness, although triggered by a physical health problem that is likely fleeting and not dangerous (I'm feeling much better, thanks), touched into the real, non-negotiable pain of being human, and being finite.

At any rate, coming face to face with your own mortality is a pretty sobering experience.  And, while painful, when the smoke began to clear last night, I was able to note a few interesting insights.

Of greatest interest was a strong experience of the following sentiment: It is not about me.

The sadness I felt wasn't about my fear of being no longer a part of the world.  It was most poignantly about not being there for my boys.  It was about their experience of having or not having a father, not about my experience of being a father.

This makes a tremendous difference.  Being a good dad is not important as an identity, or as some sort of moral or ethical imperative.  Because I dearly love my children, I behave in ways that are consistent with their needs.  Now, the result of this is that I think that I am, in fact, an excellent father to my boys.  It brings to mind a passage from Mary Oliver's poem, Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
      for a thousand miles, repenting
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
     Love what it loves

Loving comes first, being good follows.

I also reflected on other areas of my life in which I don't feel nearly the sense of clarity that I do around parenting.  My livelihood immediately sprung to mind.

I don't have the sort of clarity in my work life that I do at home.  I am interested in a great many things, and have engaged with my work deeply and with commitment.  But at the end of the day, I can't honestly say I can answer the million dollar question regarding my professional life:

What do you wish for your life to be about?

I find that there are lots of things I care about; helping people realize their path, the environment, health.  But too often I find myself trying to be good at things, about trying to leave my mark, making my contribution.

I'm right there in the middle.

I could take a page from my parenting playbook here, and recognize this essential truth:

It isn't about me.

I have my moments: when I am doing a group, coaching or counseling, I dissolve into the background a bit.  But other aspects of my work seem stickier, and trying to create the overall arc of my career seems especially frought with ego-bound rigidity.  This blog, in keeping with my initial commitments to openness, will be a place in which I explore how to get out of my own way and allow for my contribution to emerge, rather that fit myself into an idea about how a "good" professional should behave. 

I hope you can learn a bit about your journey and your own stuck points as we go.

Fathering with Flexibility

A goal I have for this blog is to share, honestly and with openness, the knowledge and experience I've gained as a student and professional in the general arena of behavior change with my own lived experience as a human being, struggling with the painful and often confusing task of striving to live a purposeful life.

The content of the blog will be quite diverse, but this thread will weave it's way into the vast majority of my posts.

So, a topic that is relevant in the highest possible regard to both change and to my lived experience of change is my role as a father. I've got two boys, three and a half and nine months of age. They are, as you might expect, the apples of my eyes.

New fatherhood is a crash course in learning to navigate change. Because, quite simply, it changes everything. It is also a really sharp opportunity to highlight an important component of successful adaptation to changing life conditions: psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility refers to the ability to adjust your behavior to effectively meet the demands of your environment while maintaining fidelity to your value system.

In other words, you are able to focus on and do what matters to you in the midst of constantly changing life circumstances. I could not imagine a quality more useful for new fathers.

It is easy; in fact it is for many of us the default setting, to try to live our lives by trying to hold on to something solid, a foundation that we can adhere tightly to. These often manifest as principles, or sacred truths that we grip tightly with resolution and determination. The problem is, it is maddeningly difficult to find something solid to hold on to in this life.

Let's use the topic at hand as an example. I could easily point to my children as the quintessetial example of what is important to me. Still, while I can, at this point, hold on to them, I won't be able to forever. The way in which I express my love to them has already changed, and will continue to change over the course of our lives- at least it had better.

What would happen if I continued to show Quinn my love for him when he is 17 in the same manner that I do now? My guess is nothing good.

This is pretty obvious, but it gets tricky. What happens when what actually occurs in our lives deviates from what is supposed to happen? When we have a notion of what things should be or an idea of how things should go, are we quick to let go and adapt to changing circumstances? In general, I would propose that most of us are actually fairly terrible at doing this, myself most emphatically included.

Psychological flexibility is born from contact with reality as it exists, right now. As such, it is often undermined by our own attempts to define what "should" be, or to relate to what is in front of us based not on the facts of the situation, but on our interpretation of those facts as filtered through our belief systems, expectations, and life experiences.

If I don't have room for flexibility, I don't have room for my kids to become who they are. If my role, or set expectation, is to do x, my kids require y and I don't adapt, I'll fail to meet their needs. Often I find myself locked into this pattern, and the results are generally not what I'd like them to be.

There are also times when I am willing to put aside my preconcieved ideas about what I am supposed to do and about how my kids are supposed to behave. During those times I listen more closely, behave more compassionately, and react with greater nimbleness. It is spontaneous, and I often feel like I am traveling without a map. When I'm willing to do this, I have found a deep and resonant feeling of satisfaction, the kind of richness that tends to come with doing my best at something that is vitally important to me.