Getting out of the way, "wiser than me" and what makes you you

This month in Hit Pause, Then Play, I think about what love is, peaks and declines, community living and the self - what is it, really?

Photo by Andrew Moca on Unsplash

🤔 3 things I’m thinking

1. Parenting, what love is, and getting out of the way (Pause and Purpose)

My son went off to university late last month. I’d been thinking about and intentionally preparing both his transition into the world and mine for months, years.

Only 14 years before, I had been blindsided by the pain of loss when his sister went to college in 2009. Her birth, college departure and marriage had each carved my heart wider, teaching me how to truly love and selflessly wish another well.

My daughter’s life moments shaped the life her brother would later have. For it is my children who taught me how to parent and to assume all the faults and foibles of my learning on the way.

As the hours dwindled before my son and I would say goodbye this last August, I rose early to live them in silence, alone. To meditate on what love is. I would sit in the quiet of a clean and modern AirBnB, warm coffee in hand, legs curled up under me. A tear would leak out. One, then another. Slowly, imperceptibly.

It occurred to me one meditative moment that love is not possession, but freedom. That the greatest love is found not in clinging but in letting go. There is, of course, the famous Kahlil Gibran poem, which speaks of children not being our children; “they are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself”, which I have read and read again over the 33 years of my parenting lifetime, and with which I wholeheartedly agree. Love is freedom, I smiled.

Photo by Laura Olsen on Unsplash

Before I said my goodbyes to my son, who was more ready for this new, critical chapter of his life than I ever could have imagined, I stood silently before him in the kitchen that morning and held him. For 60 seconds straight.

“I am sorry,” I whispered, and pulled back, looking him straight in the eye, “Unlike so many others, I do not have any words of wisdom for you, or any advice. I wish I were a better mother and had come prepared with a long and poignant speech about what is to come and what you must remember when I am gone and you are alone. But I have no such speech. All I have is this. Just two things. One, I trust you. Two, you’ll figure it out.”

Weeks later, alone in an ER, he did just that. In excruciating pain, he mobilised help, asked questions and advocated for himself.

Though thousands of miles apart, I could only support his figuring it out, trusting him completely. And he did.

I reflected on our three parenting rules and our “transition” rules:

1. Love him.

2. Feed him when hungry (physically, emotionally and intellectually).

3. Get out of his way.

2. Imagining our peaks and declines (Pause and Purpose)

I find it intriguing that we spend so much time envisioning our life’s peaks, yet rarely envision our decline. When was the last time you imagined what it would be like to age, transition your relationships, watch your health fail, lose your friends or feel your faculties fade? I wonder what would happen if we envisioned our descent; if we envisioned it as often and as much as we envision our success.

Would we approach the twilight years (our “Third Act”) with more empathy and presence, embracing life’s impermanence? In envisioning our losses, would we live more each day? By accepting our mortality, might we run and walk and design our lives more intentionally?

It seems to me that envisioning our descent invites preparation - practical, but even more so of the spirit. How do we ready our minds and hearts? Through cultivating adaptability, equanimity and trust that the winds will shift? By making room for grief amidst gratitude?

Our peaks shape our aspirations, but our valleys forge our character. Stripped of illusions, it’s possible we discover we can survive Life after all - until our last breath. Envisioning our descent makes space for us to ask: what matters most? Envisioning our descent - which we seem to do so little of - reminds us of what is here and prepares us to meet all of Life - with its many peaks and declines - wisely.

Photo by Clémence Bergougnoux on Unsplash

3. Acts of care (Pause and Purpose)

On a long walk this morning, I thought about one of my areas of interest at the moment: communal living - something we in the West do when we go off to college and sometimes at the end of our lives when we enter assisted living. I had been listening to two podcasts, The Benefits of Utopian Thinking and Why Ezra Klein Thinks “We're Living Through A Mistake”, both of which I highly highly recommend.

The thought posited is that bi-parental parenting is hard, very hard, and possibly harder than ever before in the world’s richest nations, like the United States. Nuclear families as a social construct, two-people homes with young children cut off from community, is failing us, resulting in inordinate amounts of stress, depression, family strain, teen suicide, divorce and declining birth rates.

Enter community living, as found in pandemic pods when families cast about for shared care of children, when and where they could.

Enter the “village”, which not only is a boon for children, but for adults, in providing emotional and psychological support beyond a single partner, releasing the pressure of having to be one’s romantic partner, one’s perfect co-parent, one’s coach, one’s best friend, one’s confidante, one’s cheerleader, one’s carer, one’s advocate, one’s be-all and end-all.

The speakers in the two podcasts make a strong case for setting up social structures in the West that allow us to share the joys and the burden of raising children and having families. Anywhere from moving closer to grandparents, involving godparents in our children’s lives, creating ways for other adults to participate in raising our kids.

It made me think of two things:

1. I witnessed this in New Caledonia, where parental ownership is foreign. Here, we learned, the clan raises children. When I first took my baby son into a post office in Noumea, I experienced it first-hand; all of the Melanesian women (10-12 of them) opened their arms to take my child, to care for him. They passed him around while I carried out my errands at the post office and returned him to me at the end.

2. As a worldschooling family, I learned early on that I could not be the sole teacher, learning facilitator and guardian of my child’s education. I sought experience and expertise elsewhere, eventually creating a team of amazing adults who taught our son music, judo, tennis, hiking, kite surfing, French, architecture and more. That doesn’t include all of the guides in all of the countries we visited who took him under their wing and later became some of our closest friends. These adults raised our son just as much (and more) as my husband and I did.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

As Ezra Klein says in the podcast, though, community doesn’t just happen if there are no cultural or social structures in place. It’s something you have to create, or more importantly, ask for.

One has to ask someone for help if one wants to create community. It is in the asking that we create the space for people to commit “acts of care”.

In these acts of care, one comes to love, says Alison Gopnik.

With this, I cannot agree more.

✨ 2 things that are inspiring/sparking me

1. 📖 Selfless: The Social Creation of “You” by Brian Lowery (Pause and Purpose)

I’ve just started this book (Selfless), and it is rattling my cage (in the best kind of way).

Many years ago, a good friend gently insisted we are the sum of the people we spend time with - that we do not exist in a vacuum but are who we are, and are defined by, the relationships we have and form.

As a young, staunch individualist, I took umbrage with this. I was who I was, independent, and not because, of who I frequented, I thought.

Some years later I stumbled on Ubuntu (I am who I am because of who we all are). I was older and maybe a smidgeon wiser and I had come to realise that my “I” had been formed in relation to the people and systems around me, and I was the better for it.

I’d also come to realise that I had not one part, but many parts - or selves - and that I was standing on the shoulders of giants. I couldn’t take credit for the person I was, because who I was was the result of my village elders who had “grown” me.

Then comes this book and this quote, which made me sit up in my chair:

Our self is a construction of relationships and interactions, constrained and yet in search of the feeling of freedom. This tension, the need to exist in a coherent way and the desire to do and be whatever we want at any time, defines much of what it means to be human. Where do our experiences of self come from, why do we need the feeling of freedom, why is there a tension between self and freedom, and why does any of this matter?

Now here was a book that was going to force me to think about the social creation of my “I”, my search for freedom within social systems, how the two of us interact, and how together, we share peaks and valleys. It is written by a Stanford Professor of Organizational Behavior, and honestly? So far, it’s the most thought-provoking thing I’ve read all year.

2. 🎙️”Julia Gets Wise with Jane Fonda” (Play and Pleasure)

On the premiere podcast episode of Wiser Than Me™, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (of yes, Seinfeld, fame) sits down with Jane Fonda. With a career spanning over six decades, Jane – now 85 years old – hits all the highlights: staying fit at any age, fantasizing about funerals, getting heckled on set by Katharine Hepburn … and something about a fake thumb. A funny and poignant episode that had me laughing out loud and saying, “Yes!” Highly recommend.

🔥1 spark for you

What makes you you?

Anything else?

✍️You might like one of my recent posts on Medium

• Marrying for 20 Years, Not for Life - Choosing a finite 20-year marriage over a “forever” one brought unexpected gifts of intentionality, presence and fulfilment.

• Radical Acts: Pause, Play and Pleasure - One, small, radical act can change everything.

💡Join me!

• I’m “over and out” next week (25 September-1 October) to walk the last 100 km of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. I’ll be tech-free except for the end of the day when I might post something on Instagram to let folks know how it’s going. If you’re curious, you can follow along here.

• Would you like to deepen your understanding of the 5Ps (Pause, Play, Passion, Purpose and Pleasure) and do some playful and serious work around integrating them into your daily life? Starting mid-October, I will be working one-on-one with people interested in taking a deep dive into the 5Ps. We will take one of the Ps and turn it upside down, inside out and stretch ourselves wide open. You will choose which P we start with (Will it be Pleasure? Pause? Purpose? Passion or Play? It will be up to you.). Are you curious? Let’s talk (a free, no-obligation call. 😊).

• Sign up for productivity coaching - What one thing would you like to get done or feel better about? I can help. Let's chat about how. I have 1 coaching spot open. And extra tip - for those of you who got this far in this newsletter: check out this fun, happy way to manage your tasks (extra special tip: it is ADD and ADHD-friendly).

• Hire me (and the other Captains in Captains of Leadership) to help you lead and facilitate change, growth and connection - If you’d like engagement and impact to be a regular part of your gatherings, let’s work together. If you like the sound of the new workshops I’ve built out for the International Energy Agency and the Cambodia project, connect with me on LinkedIn. Even better, let’s talk.

• Support my book - If you’d like to preview, comment on or buy a book on the principles of Pause, Play, Passion, Purpose and Pleasure, how they interact and how integrating them into your daily life will make a world of difference, make sure you’re subscribed to this newsletter and follow me on Medium. Big thanks in advance for your support … and if you have friends who might be curious about the 5Ps, spread the joy: share this newsletter!🫶)

People, Problems and Possibilities: Conceiving the 5P Framework

🙏Thank you

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• 2 things that are inspiring me

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