Beth Bonness's Blog, page 2

How do invisible expectations affect us?

Src: Martin Adams Unsplash

Standing outside a fitting room waiting for my youngest daughter to model wedding dresses, I held my iPhone. My job was to take photos and document what she liked and didn't.

As I stood there bursting a little bit, but trying to chill, I remembered trying on wedding dresses with my mom. And hating it. None of the dresses felt like me, but I went through the motions anyway.

My daughter’s first dress had spaghetti straps with a long train. She liked the cut “from the waist down.”

I stood taking photos and typing notes into my phone until I realized it was faster to whisper into the microphone, like a reporter capturing firsthand commentary for a story.

In the next dress, she resembled Audrey Hepburn. “Looks great on me, but I can’t dance.” She was drawn to mermaid cuts, but almost all of them wouldn’t let her move around freely.

At one point, she asked me which was my favorite. I was honest: it wasn’t her favorite one, at first. She could have worn any number of them, but I was drawn to an elegant one with little pearls running along the seams with a low back. I thought of my mother’s pearl necklace as part of the something-borrowed, something-blue tradition. As soon as the words slipped out of my mouth, an inside voice made me want to scrunch my face and pull the words back in. It only matters what’s her favorite.

Of course it was, but why was I so drawn to more traditional dresses decades after I chose to get married in a non-traditional dress?

***

What invisible expectations did we grow up with and still carry? How can we practice getting out of our bubbles to recognize invisible influences? And maybe in the process learn to build more empathy?

what invisible expectations do we carry?

Trailer

This month’s thought echoes podcast guest, Dr. Nilanjana Dasgupta, author of Change the Wallpaper, Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities, invites us to become aware of the invisible assumptions in the wallpaper of our lives. We walk through rooms all the time, never noticing the wallpaper. The same can be said for our childhood wallpaper that we seem to carry with us as adults, quietly gets added to by work, living in our communities, and from global influences as well.

Most of us don't notice the wallpaper when circumstances favor us and we're running with the current. But we sure do notice when conditions make us feel like we're fighting against the current.

Dr. Nilanjana describes four varieties of wallpaper: 1) group identities of those being valued and recognized in influential roles, or the “portraits on the walls” that all look the same, 2) our material culture like the design of buildings and neighborhoods and access to technology, or not, 3) our symbolic culture communicated through popular stories shared by word of mouth and internalized — like working hard will make you successful and any inequality is deserved, and 4) everyday norms and expectations allowing people to navigate, but if people don't know the rules of the game, they miss opportunities.

My daughter’s shopping for wedding dresses followed another social norm, the elaborate rituals around marriage.

how can leaving our bubbles build empathy?

As we talked, Dr. Nilanjana started sharing advice for how to change the wallpaper. I chuckled a bit, because I felt like I was at the starting gate of realizing the concept and asking myself — “What is the wallpaper of my life?”

Took me a hot minute to appreciate how learning about other people could help me understand what they were going through and how, from my position of privilege (which I often take for granted), I might also be able to help.

If you had a mom like mine, as a kid when I hurt a friend or said something mean, I suspect you too were encouraged to walk in someone else's shoes to appreciate what they were going through. Our little lessons to practice empathy and compassion as we grew up.

There are three types of empathy:

Cognitive empathy — intellectually understanding how someone else feels.

Emotional empathy — the ability to share someone else’s emotions. If someone is happy, you’re happy. And if someone is sad, you’re sad.

Compassionate empathy — taking those emotions and being drawn to act.

Research has shown another way to increase empathy is by reading fiction. When our brains enter a new world, we naturally find ourselves identifying with people and groups outside our normal bubbles.

After interviewing Dr. Nilanjana, I saw a piece in the local newspaper about a documentary series. Food Foray explored stories of immigrants who live 20 minutes east of me — in one of the most diverse counties in the state. The director, Ivana Horvet, an immigrant herself, wanted to explore the stories of immigrants while shopping, preparing, and sharing food with the film crew. As Horvet says, “Food kind of disarms us and connects us.”

I went to Food Foray with two of my daughters here in Portland. Before the screening, people stood in long lines in the theater to taste sample foods from the segments. We sat through three heartbreaking — yet hopeful immigrant stories. All pained by not being able to go back to their birth countries.

The Oaxaca mother likened her story of moving to the US as similar to someone having a birth mother (Mexico) and being adopted by a rich family (America) because her birth mother couldn’t take care of her. She loves them both, Mexico and America, but she’s sad because she can’t go back and see her family.

And a Burma father talked of racism in his country of birth, where his wife didn’t like him at first because he had darker skin. Her expectation? They would never marry. He spoke of the open systemic racism, even in a Buddhist country. I thought, and you see the US as better? Wholeheartedly, yes, he did. That surprised me. His sense of humor and easy smile were disarming. Why Oregon? A friend came here first and convinced them to come here for a fresh start.

Hearing stories of not seeing family back in their home countries made me wonder about my great-great-grandparents. How they must have missed family when they moved from Germany, France, Prussia, and Luxembourg to the US in the mid-1800s due to war, looking for safety and opportunity. I cannot imagine not being able to see one of my siblings as an adult ever again, knowing they were alive half a world away.

During the Q&A, I was drawn to the immigrants’ courage for sharing such personal stories, and also curious about the recipes and how they reminded them of their home country and how they wanted to share them with everyone here. I can't wait to visit Supermercados grocery store and shop their wall of chilis and avocado leaves and listen to more stories.

“It’s through those little stories that we often understand the circumstances of someone’s life that is different from our own.”

— Dr. Nilanjana Dasgupta

Understanding privilege means realizing how much the current is carrying you forward, and appreciating the perspective of others who are swimming against that same current.

In our interview, Dr. Nilanjana offers some positive steps we can take:
1. Step into a new space to interact with a new person different from you.
2. Listen to stories of people whose perspectives you don’t understand.
3. Look for ways to mix food or music as ways to change the wallpaper.
4. If you’re a person connected to many others, use your influence to open doors for others with less privilege.

***

Watching my youngest in her favorite dress, I was reminded of four generations of wedding dresses: a 3/4-length 1920s flapper dress for my grandmother, a Grace Kelly long, satin gown with pearls for my mother, a 3/4-length, one-size-fits-all my husband found on the cover of Cosmopolitan in 1980 standing in line at a grocery store for me, and a donated one-time-use, proceeds go to charity Brides for a Cause gown for my youngest daughter. I wonder what kind of dress the woman from Burma wore?

Uncertainty swirls around expectations. We all have expectations of other people, and other people have expectations of us. Uncovering those can be tricky; they’re so intertwined in our perspective that we don’t notice them like the wallpaper in many rooms we walk around in.

Uncertainty swirls around expectations. We all have expectations of others, and they have expectations of us. Unraveling these can be challenging because they’re deeply ingrained in our perspectives, often unnoticed like the wallpaper in many rooms we pass through.

WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS.

If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to subscribe to my thought echoes newsletter below. 

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How can asking “why” help us uncover our intentions?

Src: Le Mucky Unsplash

We’re sitting at our kitchen table of the last few decades, one of the last meals before demolition starts on our latest remodel. My 3-year-old granddaughter squirms a little in the same chair where our youngest used to hold court growing up. She eats from a bowl of beans and rice with one of her little spoons.

She’s been asking “why” questions all day.

When the little rock-climber-in-training says “why” — it’s a drawn-out dramatic syllable, verging on two. Wh-yyy with an upward lilt as her lips open wide and cheeks stretch into an almost smile. Her blue eyes stare at whoever says something she wants to know more about. There’s an urgency to fill her little growing brain with information from her favorite people.

To her parents at the table, I say, ”She’s primed for leading a root cause analysis team.” I grin as a sip some wine and take another bite from my beans and rice bowl.

There’s a funny look on her dad’s face. What?

My husband and I both worked on product development teams and explained that when there’s a problem, you keep asking “why” until you get to the root cause. Five times is the magic number.

“Why do you ask so many why questions?” I said.

“Because I need someone to tell me the answer.”

The little rock-climber-in-training sips her water. She knows she needs to hydrate.

***

What are intentions and how are they different from goals? How can asking “why” help us uncover our intentions as we plan for and welcome the new year?

what are intentions & how are they different than goals?

In this month’s thought echoes podcast with Caroline Adams Miller, author of Big Goals, I’m learning to reframe my mindset around goals and dreams. Caroline introduced me to the science of Goal-Setting Theory. (Yes, there is a science behind goal setting, and it involves setting challenging goals.)

When we think of goals, they’re a target we’re driving toward. With intentions, they’re a mindset helping us focus on why we want to pursue a goal or dream in the first place.

Maybe it’s because I’m retired, but the thought of setting goals snaps me back to corporate’s quarterly revenue targets (which I do not miss). Now, I’m trying to choose where my energy goes and enjoy the process leading to fulfilling a goal or dream.

One of the key elements in setting a big goal or dream is understanding why we’re interested in the first place. Caroline reintroduced me to VIA Character Strengths. A simple 15-minute test identifies your top strengths. Turns out that learning our strengths can help uncover how we can live our lives with intention and fuel our goals and dreams.

Ten years ago, my #1 strength was Curiosity. Although still in my top five, Zest has risen to the top spot, which I fully embrace. When I feel a bit burned out, it’s like a balloon of energy is deflating, a good sign to turn up my curiosity (a tip from my report). And when overused (ask my family) I’m in everyone’s face with whatever I’m excited about, a good sign I need to chill.

I encourage everyone to give VIA a try.

how can asking “why” uncover our intentions?

Everyone has goals and dreams. Understanding one’s intention for why sets a compass and helps with commitment. For anyone who has struggled to meet a goal, there may be a surprising reason. Goal-Setting Theory explains the difference between learning goals and performance goals.

When you’re learning something new, it’s more about what you’re learning, not how fast you can learn it.

My granddaughter is learning how to rock-climb. She’s not ready to do El Capitan anytime soon. Hopefully never if her grandfather has anything to say about it.

I’m learning different ways to make vegan desserts. I am not ready for the Great English Bakeoff. But, when it comes to streamlining my tax record preparation each year, those are all-in performance goals.

Another piece of advice Caroline offered, especially for women — “When you dare to have a big goal or a big dream, the first person you utter that goal or dream to, better have a response that is curious and enthusiastic.”

If they don’t, she explained, that first response can make you walk away from your goal. You need to protect your big dream at all costs — it’s called goal-shielding.

“Dreams push us to grow, challenge ourselves, and discover what we’re truly capable of. The greatest achievements come from stepping outside our comfort zones and embracing the hard things. That’s where we uncover our strengths and see who stands beside us.”

— Caroline Adams Miller

When I first shared my big dream of writing a memoir about saving a mansion with my husband, he said, “Why would anyone want to read our story?”

My heart sank.

Although we were partners in the venture to save the mansion, he took center stage as the remodeling expert. Writing a memoir would be my project.

After we saved the mansion, when I chatted with our banker at the time, he said, “You keep saying this project is all about your husband, but you light up every time you tell the story.”

Writing a memoir is a learning goal for me. When I use the 5 Whys to dig deeper — it's about proving I can and about legacy memory-making. It’s ultimately a love story to my 17-year-old self and her 17-year-old boyfriend.

***

Back at the kitchen table, I asked my granddaughter a follow-up why question.

“Why do you need someone to tell you the answer?”

“Because I don’t know the answer.”

She furrowed her brow. Don’t you adults understand me?

We all shook our heads. She knows exactly why she is asking all those questions. We didn't need to go the full five rounds.

What are your dreams or goals? How can you ask “why” with curiosity and without judgement to dig into your mindset and motivation? What lights you up and where can you incorporate more of it into your daily life?

WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS. SHARE YOUR DREAMS & WHYS BELOW.

If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to subscribe to my thought echoes newsletter below. 

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What if we invited more wonder vs happiness into our lives?

Src: Greg Rakozy Unsplash

After almost 50 years I sometimes finish my husband’s sentences. But when there’s a pause, I know there’s something carefully-crafted coming.

We’re standing near the dining table, a few feet apart. He’s reading some mail.

'“Did you read the article I texted you? On happiness?”

A moment passes. I keep my lips closed, waiting for his reaction.

“Yes …”

“The part about toxic positivity?” I said.

More silence. What’s he going to say?

“That’s you.”

My heart falls in my chest. My mouth goes dry. I want to defend myself, but pause a beat. I sent the article for a reason.

“When the author talked about her mother being a happy-chondriac, I thought of Mom, but know it’s me too … always rushing to put a positive spin on things.”

He nods his head up and down, still checking the mail before our eyes meet. I stood straighter to listen.

“You do drive me crazy with always trying to find the positive.”

***

What is wonder versus happiness? And what if we invited more wonder into our lives?

what is wonder versus happiness?

In this month’s thought echoes podcast with Monica Parker, author of The Power of Wonder, she described how she came to write the book. Originally she focused on wanting to help people “metabolize the change they were thrust into” — losing jobs, corporate takeovers, people on death row. During her research she found — people who were most resilient to change, looked at the world through a lens of wonder.

Finding a language for wonder was an important element of Monica’s work. Examining wonder as a verb - akin to curiosity, and as a noun - closer to awe.

When we think of happiness, it’s a single emotion and all positive. With wonder, there’s an element of taking in what happens, the positive and the negative. “I think that looking at the negative through a wonder lens, allows us to not resist and not deny the negative, but then also recognize what positive exists,” Monica says.

My “toxic positivity” comes from wanting things to swing positive (all the time), searching for a silver lining. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Research suggests that optimism plays a role in our physical and mental well-being, according to Immaculata De Vivo, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

My mom modeled optimism all of her life — with rare exceptions. The older she got, she lingered longer on her list of maladies before saying something like, “But it’s better than the alternative!” with a chuckle and self-deference for not being in control anymore and how hard that was.

When something bad happens and we too quickly jump to a positive place, others may feel we’re being dismissive. Understanding more about what is happening allows curiosity to step in for deeper listening. One can acknowledge the “suckatude of reality” as Monica says when telling a story about her mother’s dealing with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis for her father before embracing hope and that the two can live together — the “suckitude” and the hope.

A lesson I learned from reading Monica’s article — I have a tendency to jump to the positive side of the teeter-totter way too quickly. For myself and others. I'm putting off what's going to have to get processed later, and it may not come out in the most graceful ways. So, I’m trying to take a pause, even if it's a short one, to acknowledge whatever's happening. Even if it doesn’t feel good or to let my brain try to figure out what’s going on and why something triggered me or someone else.

what if we invited more wonder into our lives?

Monica’s book has oodles of suggestions for how to invite more wonder into our lives, but they all point toward slowing down. She identifies three ways to help slow our thoughts: meditation, being in nature, and sleep. If we don’t have a good night’s sleep, it’s hard not to get caught up in the busyness of our lives. We become more reactive, so it’s hard to pause and absorb what’s going on. Can we learn to be patient enough to be curious and ask what does this mean to me, or might mean to someone else being triggered?

With relationships where we’re quick to jump-in to solve a problem or knee-jerk justify our position, Monica explains how a filter of curiosity can help. “Our brain is finding footholds out of the hole that we've dug ourselves, or out of the hole that we've been thrown into. And that curiosity can also show another person that you're genuinely interested in their needs.”

We talked about some of our personal wonderbringers. (Monica: perfect sunsets, sharing ideas, art and theater. Mine: Joshua Tree, granddaughters, photographing moments with friends and family.) Monica mentioned a funny story that made me chuckle-cringe. She shared how a husband loved debating and his wife didn’t. His wife loved being in nature. He thought maybe she wasn’t as smart, before realizing what brings her wonder was just as significant to her, but in a different way than for him.

“I think when we start to see what our wonderbringers are and recognize that they aren’t just hobbies or things we like to do … they’re in fact fundamental to the foundation of who we are as humans.”

— Monica Parker

It’s hard for me not to feel wonder watching my rock-climber-in-training, 3-year-old granddaughter dance around in her homemade, scarf-skirt and overhear whispering conversations with her animal friends. I love watching her with little finger puppets under pillows and blankets in a fort she built in the living room. A 3-year-old’s imagination at play, viewing life from the lens of wonder, by default.

What a privilege to witness her world, imagining how she’s experiencing life with all her firsts. I wonder how she sees us adults. Does she feel sorry for us, that we can’t see what she does?

And with her 10-month-old baby sister, so ready to crawl, earnest frustration on her face as she baby-grunts and reaches for toys and books, barely within reach. There’s bittersweet knowledge that her practicing being human and the frustration she feels now, will serve her well in the future — if, she holds onto that curiosity and determination when times get tough later in life.

***

Earlier this week, when setting up our Christmas tree, the tree got the better of my husband. I stood holding the trunk at arm’s length, prickly needles tickling my fingers. My legs braced for balance and to keep the tree from falling into the window. My husband’s body on its side, mostly hidden under the tree (except for his legs I keep tripping over when I step back to see if the tree is straight). He grunts struggling to center the tree in the stand, trying to keep it plumb. The tree smells like chain saw gas, and so does he.

After more tries than we want to admit, we manage to place all the lights around the tree and step back. She leans a ridiculous amount. The top of the tree shaped like the Harry Potter sorting hat, kinked to one side — seems to laugh at us. I almost chuckle out loud and want to say “but it’s a beautiful tree!”

My husband’s shoulders drop. He shakes his head and swears under his breath. I remember Monica’s words about not jumping too quickly to the other side of the teeter-totter, and say, “It’s frustrating … taking so many times to get the tree balanced. Tree suckitude.” He has no idea what I’m talking about, but I laugh.

***

Monica’s words of wisdom — “I think for folks, what I want them to see is that there is more, that this life we live in sometimes drags us down, that can polarize, and be full of strife … if we choose to see the world through a lens of wonder … not in a Pollyanna sense … if we seek wonder together, I believe, that we can create a more tolerant, peaceful world.”

What are your wonderbringers?

WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS. SHARE YOUR WONDERBRINGERS BELOW.

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Does the concept of home change over time?

Src: Elijah Grimm Unsplash

On a trip to my Midwest, childhood home after Mom died, I played pool alone in the game-room. When I remember my years living there, the first memories that come to mind, hover around that game-room.

Dad teaching me to play pool. Chatting on the phone with my then boyfriend, now husband. Imagine a long curly, aqua phone cord stretching from the kitchen as I paced back and forth. Taxidermy heads watching over me. And on holidays, like Thanksgiving, extended family members taking turns playing eight-ball, arguing over where to put the cue ball if you scratched.

Growing up we didn’t talk about politics at the dinner table. Politics went out of the house in the form of checks, and sat on bookshelves I didn’t notice until after my dad’s death. I don’t remember any lawn signs, but I do remember Dad sitting in the den writing checks.

Dad’s handwriting was crisp and precise, same as his demeanor. I always wanted to write like him. His “J”s not flamboyant, but consistent and commanding. My mother’s handwriting full of curves and the social graciousness of thank you notes. She didn’t dot her “i”s like we did in high school when we wrote notes and passed them around in origami shapes. A low-tech version of texting almost 50 years ago.

When the Vietnam War was nearing the end, I remember the first of two times I yelled at my father.

Near the game-room, we both stood holding our ground. Blue eyes to blue eyes. I asked to go to Washington DC to march against the war. My father raised his voice calling me naive. I met the intensity of his volume. I don’t remember the exact words, but the scene is etched into my memory in slow motion, sound on mute. I felt empowered to state my reasons, and he heard me out. He held the money I didn’t convince him to loan me, but I felt safe enough to argue.

What does home mean to you and where do you feel at home? Does our concept of home shift over time?

what is home?

As Diane E. Dreher Ph.D. writes in “Where Do You Feel at Home?” — “We all need a sense of psychological home, a space of refuge, comfort, and security.”

I’ve lived in our Pacific Northwest home for 40 years, twice as long as my childhood home. Our Portland home, where memories of all three girls growing up reside, their photos sprinkled upstairs and down, their laughter and tears floating with the dust mites.

As we approach the holidays, kicked off in the US by Thanksgiving, there is much talk about home and family. When we spent time in Amsterdam this summer, creating a temporary home-away-from-home, the concept of hygge kept tickling me from the side. Our extended family of grown daughters, their partners and granddaughters, inhabited a lovely AirBnB by someone who clearly enjoyed sharing their sense of home in a beautiful city.

According to Everyday Hygge — “In essence, hygge is a lifestyle that encourages being present, mindful, and caring towards oneself and others. It involves taking a pause from the daily hustle and seeking solace in what’s happening at the moment.” Vacation allowed a pause from our normal busyness to appreciate everything a bit more.

Home has its own space-time dimension. A time warp of past memories colliding with life at the moment: remembering the girls when they were little, seeing them as adults, seeing them with kids — being all together in a way that blended past, present, and hinted at the future.

does our concept of home shift over time?

For this month’s thought echoes podcast (now available on YouTube), Morgan Baker, professor and author of Emptying the Nest: Getting Better at Goodbyes, shares a pivotal time in her life when two aspects converged. Her eldest daughter left for college and she parted with nine puppies from a litter their family raised. Morgan’s sense of losing her footing on who she was impacted her deeply.

“I think the concept of home shifts over time.”

— Morgan Baker

In our conversation, Morgan spoke of the concept of home being really important, a way to ground ourselves. and of feeling we belong. Her book describes how she learned to focus on herself and rediscover what she wanted. She watched her identify shift as she created another version of home. Her words of advice include creating an environment with the people in your day to day life, accepting that they change over time.

***

The second time I yelled back at my father was about a tire. Mom and Dad were all dressed up for a trip as I drove them to the Milwaukee Airport via I-94.

A large angle iron was in the middle lane right in front of me. Cars on either side. No time to switch lanes. The car jerked going over the debris.

Dad barked, “Pull-over!”

As we stood on the highway shoulder, the cars whizzed by.

”I’ll change it, you’re all dressed up!”

Of course I could change a tire, although I’d never done it before.

Dad overruled me. He wiped his greasy hands on his handkerchief before sliding into the backseat next to Mom. We rode in silence the rest of the way.

When I got home, I practiced over and over how to change a tire. From inside the house, I could hear the curly-corded, aqua phone ring.

In a calm, low voice, ”A little birdie told me I needed to call and apologize.” I knew Mom put him up to it.

Our memories exist as a complex web with deep echoes. The memory of arguing with Dad over marching in Washington DC, now intertwined with my own protective, maternal vantage point.

Home changes over time, memories layered with later perspectives looking back in time. I’m learning to move over a bit and leave room for my future selves to add their vantage points too, like making room for another side dish at the Thanksgiving table.

WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS. WHAT DOES HOME MEAN TO YOU?

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Do our experiences have a shape?

Src: Joel Filipe @joelfilip Unsplash

As I French braid my 3-year-old granddaughter‘s hair, she’s watching a NASA YouTube video having graduated from panda and puppy cams while I untangle her mane. Three to four minutes is all I need. This time she’s watching SpaceX take off with the Europa Clipper from earlier this week. Afterwards we go upstairs to the play area outside her bedroom to color in planets on printouts I brought.

“Your name is on its way to space.”

My granddaughter tilts her head and picks up an red pencil that needs sharpening. I proceed to sharpen the red one and a dozen or so other colors.

“You know that rocket you watched blasting off into space? It has people’s names on it, including yours and mine.”

She continued coloring the red spot on Jupiter we heard about on the video.

“The spaceship is going to one of Jupiter’s moons. Did you know Jupiter is my favorite planet.”

“What’s Mama’s favorite planet?”

I smile, “We’ll have to ask her when she gets home.”

We all have experiences. Do our experiences have a shape? What’s the difference between individual and group experiences?

what is experience?

We all carry around experiences as invisible layers. They drape over us as they become our memories. I imagine a teetering pile of old luggage, some open with photographs spilling out, caught in a frozen moment. We take snapshot moments in our personal history and hold them up as complete by themselves. That would be like cutting out someone’s heart and saying that represents the total person. We’re more complex than that. So too, if we unpack our experiences too much, we can miss appreciating the whole of the experience. 

In this month’s thought echoes podcast, I spoke with Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, a philosopher of mind and metaphysics, and author of Modes of Sentience: Psychedelics, Metaphysics, Panpsychism. We talked about consciousness as experience, which he says at a fundamental level is a feeling, and more akin to sentience.

Dr. Peter wrote of Alfred North Whitehead, the father of process philosophy, holding the view that “everything is a process, an event. And we humans conceptualize events as things. but actually, everything is flowing constantly.” He goes on to say that our experience takes in not only what our brain and body does, but everything around us.

“Feeling is out there. And we kind of breathe it in.”

— Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

A reference I loved reading in Dr. Peter’s book from Whitehead called out “drops of experience” and how our perceptions become part of the perceiver. He also talked about consciousness and experience from an octopus's perspective. An interesting fact: two-thirds of an octopus's brain lies in its arms. A human brain may be necessary for human consciousness, but not other consciousnesses.

After coloring planets, I rocked in one of the chairs my husband made from a walnut tree in our backyard. All three daughters have one. Each chair has an inscription from The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein – “and the tree was happy.” My granddaughter reached for a copy of the lime-green book in a secret cubby under the seat. She didn’t ask me to read the book today, she seemed to be making sure the secret was safe before she climbed up on the window seat facing west.

“The moon’s waking up.”

As I crouched down by her, she pointed at the fading moon. I didn’t tell her the moon was setting.

“You know how Earth has a moon?”

My granddaughter nodded.

“Jupiter has a bunch of moons and your name is on its way to one of them.”

Turns out that not only are there over 2 million other names going up to Europa besides my granddaughter’s and mine, but a poem by Ada Limón, US Poet Laureate. “In Praise of Mystery” is inscribed on the vault plate inside the clipper

alongside visual representations of “water” in 103 languages, plus the symbol representing the word in American Sign Language.

do our experiences have different shapes?

On a recent trip I read PHI, a voyage from brain to soul, by Giuolio Tononi. A delightful trip through time and hypothetical conversations about consciousness between Galileo and people like Alan Turing and Darwin. Tononi presented consciousness as experience, with every experience having a shape. That struck me. 

What’s the shape of experience? It’s not static like a photograph representing a moment. It’s more kinetic, experience moves around. There’s an element of time wrapped around our moments. Some experience shapes may solidify like ice, as in a cooling relationship. Or melt like chocolate in a sweet friend exchange. Or fossilize over time like grief.

If experiences have shapes, they are the shape of our emotions. Gratitude for my granddaughters and daughters when they were little, has the shape of a slow smile warming up from my heart in my chest.

When I read to my granddaughter as part of her bedtime routine. We had a little back and forth over making choices getting ready which included crocodile tears in those dark, blue eyes. She did not want the planets pjs which surprised me, she wanted the penguins. Her pajamas, her choice. 

Once snuggled into her toddler bed, fairy lights winked at us from her closet. As I grabbed from a dozen or so books in a basket by her bed, an image of a fish, the size of a salad plate with lots of different colored scales eyed me. I smile and took a pause. I opened Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister who I met on social media earlier in the week. I’d mentioned to Marcus I thought my granddaughter had his book and would look for it when I got to Seattle. The book found me.

As I read Rainbow Fish to my granddaughter. The shape of that experience, that experience of coincidence, felt like seeing a shooting star. Rare.

And the Octopus’s advice in the story: share what you have excess of, share your plenty. As I cuddled up next to my granddaughter, I thought of my plenty to share with her. My gratitude. My energy. My time.

how does personal experience differ from group experience?

After reading PHI I imagined not only consciousness as a personal experience, but experimented with what is the shape of the experience of a group. An image of a flock of birds moving in unison popped to mind from visiting the Oregon coast. Hundreds of birds appeared to dance above the water, back and forth as if choreographed ahead of time. I recorded them for a long while before the organic flock structure scattered into individual birds all going their own way. 

That lead to a question for Dr. Peter.

Does a flock of birds moving together (or any group e.g. common experiences at sports events or concerts) have a consciousness that disseminates once the flock (or group) disperses?

Dr. Peter said, “Group minds is a very interesting topic and it demands more research. And so, what I will say is purely speculative. But you notice, certain jazz bands often talk about this kind of jazz mind, as it were, this group mind and just knowing what will come next somehow when you're in the flow of it.”

I first started reading Modes of Sentience on a plane back to Wisconsin when we suspected Mom was dying and waiting for all of her girls to arrive. When I imagine Mom’s consciousness as experience becoming memory fragments, I simmered in the concept that when we die, our fragments of experiences are left behind like ingredients, setting sail on the breeze of time. Those fragments of our experiences live on through our children and whatever artifacts we might leave behind (photos, works of art, traditions).

###

The Europa Clipper should reach Jupiter’s orbit sometime in 2030, when my granddaughter turns ten. After traveling 1.8 billion miles to Europa, Jupiter’s second moon where it will search for watery life during 49 flybys. And as one scientist said, if everything we believe is there for life and we find no existence of life, that’ll be important too.

Both my granddaughter’s name and mine are on their way to Europa. Mom loved the moon, so before she died, I signed her up too.

Last April during Poetry Month, my husband and I were in Joshua Tree. We’re back for our fall trip, enjoying the dark skies during during a new moon and hoping to catch a glimpse of the comet A3 before she finishes orbiting earth until the next time 80,000 years from now. Seemed appropriate to write another poem acknowledging the connectedness of this universe we live in and will die in, to acknowledge all who have come before and who will come after us.    

oh, to launch

a whisper into space 

breathe in the stardust   

WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS. WHAT SHAPES DOES YOUR EXPERIENCE HAVE?

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How can we reframe defiance?

Src: Anika Huizinga @iam_anih Upsplash

We played in the lush, backyard garden area. My 3-year-old granddaughter coloring on the ledge of a quiet fire pit. Me resting on sun-warmed cushions nearby. We’d just finished reading one of my favorite books, The Most Magnificent Idea, about a little girl and her side-kick dog finding ideas everywhere. A slight breeze blew a few strands of blond hair that escaped from her pigtails as she clutched a crayon, jerking it back and forth on the page trying to keep the red within the lines. My husband and I were watching her while her baby sister napped so her parents could have some couple’s time.

My granddaughter glanced up with her eyes wide, a big smile on her face and asked me to color with her. I thought a moment. My husband and I spent the day walking everywhere. I said, “I’d love to, but BB’s tired. How about BB watches you color?” Her lit-up face switched off like a light, as she quietly stared at her picture for a moment. She got up and walked past the outdoor dining table into the kitchen. I followed her thinking she had to go to the bathroom and watched her plop down on the floor next to the sofa. She sat criss-cross applesauce with her head in her little hands.

“Are you sad?” I asked.

“Yes.” She said quietly without looking up.

What is defiance? How can we reframe defiance? And why is learning how, so important for our relationships and mental health?

what is defiance?

A few weeks ago while in Amsterdam at an AirBnb with our adult daughters and two granddaughters, I was reading a book about defiance. How we, especially girls, could benefit from rethinking the concept of being a good girl (which is really shorthand for behaving as expected and not making a fuss).

During this month’s thought echoes podcast I interviewed Dr. Sunita Sah, author of Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes. We had an invigorating conversation about the concept of defiance.

When I heard about Dr. Sunita’s book, my initial reaction was to see her project on defiance as negative and aggressive. She wrote about big important examples from Rosa Parks and George Floyd. I wondered how I was going to tie those stories into my curiosity around the topic of reframing.

Then I started reading her book. Her concepts of: good girl, finding our true yes, and comply versus consent — struck a chord one by one. There were large historical moments, but also everyday moments as examples to learn from — like the story about her son not wanting to watch the Olympic torch. And when my granddaughter took a pause — confidently, not putting up a tantrum to go to a private spot to be sad after I didn’t color with her - I felt I was watching a reframe of defiance in the little body of a 3-year-old. What could I learn from both Dr. Sunita and my granddaughter?

According to Dr. Sunita, “We need a new definition. We need to reframe it. The old definition is that defiance is to challenge the power of another person openly and boldly. My new definition is simply acting in accordance with your values when there's pressure to do otherwise.”

Dr. Sunita invites us instead, to not view defiance as bad and compliance as good, but to dig deeper into why we sometimes feel pressured to comply and that sometimes when we comply, it does not mean we consent or agree. She also shares how our individual acts of consent and dissent build a society, starting at home, and in our workplaces and communities.

how can we reframe defiance?

According to the American Psychological Association, reframing is “a process of reconceptualizing a problem by seeing it from a different perspective.” Reframing is all about finding another way to approach a situation.

During the trip I was able to reimagine, to reframe the generational “good girl” echoes as I overheard my daughter encourage her 3-year-old that it’s ok to be sad when she doesn’t get her way. To watch my granddaughter find a quiet place to take a private moment. Or when my daughter asks her daughter to make a choice (active encouragement that she does have choices) whether to eat what’s on her plate or what to do for five minutes before she goes to bed — and most notable for me — that one of her choices is “no.”

Dr. Sunita emphasized the importance of “recognizing tension in the moment and taking a pause to assess the situation. I call this the power of the pause.” She explains how people feel tension in many different ways. “It could be like a punch in the gut, or it could be your throat closing up, or it could be a conscious thought — this doesn't feel right to me.”

During our interview she went on to describe tension as resistance to resistance that comes up when we need to resist something even though we’re conditioned to comply. She explains how “we push away our doubts and feeling uncomfortable. We end up resisting being defiant.”

In Dr. Sunita’s book she outlines the results of decades of research with the 5 stages of defiance: recognizing tension, acknowledging it, articulating it, taking a pause, and acting.

It all starts with tension.

“The reason that attention to tension is important is because it's the first step. Does the situation violate my values? You're remembering who you are, what your values are, and thinking, does this situation violate those values? Then you want to look at the situation and think, maybe I want to defy, but is it safe and is it effective? And is this the right time?”

— Dr. Sunita Sah

As I read her book while on vacation, her insights provided me encouragement to reflect on how I viewed opportunities for defiance in my past. I was one of a few women in a high-tech company in the Pacific Northwest. Early in my career I was at a sales meeting at a resort on the east coast; my job was to provide technical training as part of a new product launch. After dinner one night, one of the guys invited all of us to watch a comedy show back in one of hotel rooms. There were lots of people going so I said sure. I liked all these guys and felt perfectly comfortable around them.

When I walked in someone offered me a seat close to the TV. People were drinking beers and voices grew louder. I was talking to someone, not really paying attention to the show until everyone started to laugh. I did too, at first. The comedian was Andrew Dice Clay. I wasn’t familiar with him at the time. I laughed with everyone else, then the jokes started leaning more and more offensive.

What made it more uncomfortable was the fact that I was pregnant. Not so much not to travel, but definitely showing. There weren’t any managers there and I didn’t get up to leave. Felt like a challenge to wait it out, act like it was no big deal to be accepted. But I felt awful afterwards. Definitely a situation where if I’d made a scene or even walked out of the room, it felt like I’d be considered somehow less than, as if laughing at Clay’s jokes made me a better software engineer. For decades there were times where I thought — it’s not going to make any difference if I speak up … but years of off-color comments and sexism wore on me.

Later in my career when I was a manager on a technical conference trip, one of the engineers put his hand on my knee while watching a demonstration in a movie theater. I didn’t hesitate to pluck his hand off my knee and leave. I didn’t report him to HR. The power dynamic was different. I did not feel threatened for my job and he got the message based on our discussion the next day.

Reading Dr. Sunita’s stories about people not always defying in the moment somehow drove home that there are times when we don’t defy. Although it may feel like a missed opportunity, it may just not have been the most effective time.

why is learning how to reframe defiance important to our relationships and mental health?

When I asked Dr. Sunita for any words of wisdom she could offer in navigating our relationships and contributing our mental health, she talked about making defiance a practice.

“We need an action plan that really starts before the moment of crisis. We have to remember that defiance is not a character trait, it's a skill.” When we honestly do not know what our yes is, we can pause and ask what’s at the opposite end of that no? I’ll admit, sometimes I need to examine my no before I can articulate my yes.

Once we know what we want, then we can proactively practice. Dr. Sunita walked through concepts of: visualizing, scripting, role-playing, and practicing defiance. She quoting a Greek poet, “under duress, we don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

When I asked about advice for parents or interacting with kids she said, “We all want to raise children who know their boundaries and can navigate relationships effectively … We you want to raise what I call Moral Mavericks that can take responsibility and speak up and act when necessary.” She refers to the Defiance Domino Effect, where children see their parents and the adults around them defying and can learn to do the same.

What I’ve learned from both Dr. Sunita and my 3-year-old granddaughter, is that reframing is looking at life experiences, both at a macro and micro level as an opportunity to learn more about ourselves. It’s about getting our heads above the ocean of our lives to see where we are going and what values we share with others. And that it’s ok to take a pause to be sad.

WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS. HOW DOES DEFIANCE SHOW UP IN YOUR LIFE?

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How can we improve our resilience?

Src: Neuroscience News

When I think of resilience, I think of my grandmother Lila. She lived in a small town in Northern Wisconsin with her four sisters and grade-school educated parents. Lila moved south to Milwaukee for nursing school and once she started working she sent money back home. One by one her sisters followed.

Lila met my grandfather across an operating table back in the 1920s. My grandparents paid off mortgages for their home and a small working farm before the depression hit. Helpful, because after the depression people paid with bags of potatoes or helping my grandmother with their kids.

Decades later, enduring a spouse’s sickness was measured in minutes. Lila gave her doctor husband syringes filled with sugar water to draw out the time between opioid shots after his heart surgery. Lila’s effort to wean my grandfather off his meds because they both knew what becoming addicted would mean.

When I moved cross country, I thought of Lila relocating to an unknown city as the eldest daughter in her 20s too.

What is resilience? Why are some people more resilient than others? How can we improve our resilience?

what is resilience?

According to the Mayo Clinic, “Resilience means being able to adapt to life's misfortunes and setbacks.” Resilience doesn’t make problems (perceived or otherwise) go away, but it allows us to see past them and better handle the stress. We all find ourselves in less than optimal situations, big ones and little ones. And if you live long enough, you’re faced with ample opportunities to learn to bounce back.

This week, my primary doctor retired, almost seventeen years after meeting him as the hospitalist during the weeks I was in/out of the ER.

As I drove to the appointment, I searched for a way to describe my relationship with Dr. K and speculated what his absence as my doctor would feel like. It wasn’t as if I checked in with him every day, but an image of a safety net persisted. Dr. K had history with me in the hospital when the neurologists didn’t know what was going on. He was there for days at a time overseeing my care and interacting with my husband, daughters, and sister. I remember Dr. K gave my husband his pager number which brought great comfort since we never knew when I’d have another event.

When I think of a safety net, I conjure a picture of a trapeze artist and maybe in someway I was up on the high-wire feeling invincible in my late 40s. Well, the stress weakened the wire while I went back-and-forth and back-and-forth until one day, I fell off.

It took the neurologists two weeks to figure out what was happening in my brain. Once they did, they diagnosed my strokes and perscribed boatloads of meds and told me to take it easy while my brain and body healed. I was grateful the episodes stopped and I wasn’t going to fall off the trapeze again. But in reality the high-wire was lowered and my safety net was raised.

My previous goal to stop my brain freeze (and not the ice cream kind) morphed into a new goal: get off all meds, become healthy again without the meds.

I often wondered why I wanted to get off all of my meds — now I think of my grandmother Lila, giving my grandfather placebo shots to gain a few more minutes to help wean him off the opioids. She had a single focused determination that worked. Maybe our resilience is inherited.

why are some people more resilient than others?

In this month’s thought echoes podcast, I interviewed Maggie Jackson, author and journalist. Against the backdrop of her latest book, Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, I learned that uncertainty has a lot to do with resilience. Maggie says, “That was a surprise to me … there are many different ways I talk about uncertainty as good stress … that kind of wakefulness you get when stressed is part and parcel with the flexibility that goes into resilience.”

And Desiree Delgadillo encourages in a new UCLA Health study, “Highly resilient individuals were less likely to catastrophize, and they keep a level head.”

Maggie shared how curious people are typically highly tolerant of stress, and enjoy exploring the unknown. They approach life differently. “Curious people argue to learn, they’re more open to other’s opinions.” That line struck me — how many times have I impatiently waited for someone to finish speaking, not fully listening, holding back to make my point …

My biggest takeaway from Maggie’s research involved a relatively new personality trait: tolerance for uncertainty. She explained, “We all land somewhere on the spectrum ... Scientists are treating anxiety and other mental disorders simply by targeting tolerance of uncertainty, because that's how important our approach to uncertainty is to mental well-being.”

how can we improve our resilience?

In a recent Big Think article, ”Reboot your mind for flow, unanxiousness, and resilience,” Wendy Suzuki talks about cognitive flexibility. The idea of approaching situations from different perspectives. How sometimes we look at the same situation in the same way we approached it when we were six-years-old. Cognitive flexibility says if we consider there are different ways to approach something, the ability to adopt a different perspective becomes possible.

In her Psychology Today article “Resilience, What it is and Why We Need it” Dr. Monica Vermani encourages, “We can build resiliency by reframing negative events, having faith in ourselves over our fear, and controlling the messages we tell ourselves.”

Resilience for me is about reframing. Something happens, an obstacle is put in your path, and you try to figure out how to get past it. I knew in my bones I’d be okay after my strokes, but I didn’t really know what okay would look like or how I would get there.

I was hyper-vigilant in my movements and speech. My words were slippery. It took lots of effort to camp-counselor them to behave. I wasn’t tending to sales projection spreadsheets for awhile, so I used my disability paperwork as my personal Sudoku. Then I worked up to tracking my meds and exercise with color-coded spreadsheets before I tiptoed back into creating formulas and graphs.

Along the way I remembered a time when I'd done something hard in the past (climbing Mt. Hood) with my mantra during training and coming down the mountain with a sprained ankle: one foot in front of the other. Mt. Hood became my bottomless reservoir of resilience, along with the support of my family and friends.

After 3 1/2 years my favorite spreadsheet line ever: Row 265 “Dr. K agreeds, official stop of meds.” Little did I know my first granddaughter would be born exactly ten years later.

WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS. WHAT’S IN YOUR RESILIENCE RESERVOIR?

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Wonder what your dreams are trying to tell you?

Src: Unsplash Yohann Lc

For decades, my most persistent dream involves running in a forest after a little girl heading toward a cliff. Sometimes a full moon shines through the tree tops, other times rain soaks us. Often she wears pajamas, occasionally a summer sundress. I call out for her to stop, but she can’t hear me in the howling wind. She always jumps off the cliff before I can get to her.

The nightmares started around 10-years-old after my 3-year-old sister died. I never spoke of them at the time. I don’t remember when I had the first one or how long they lasted initially before they popped back up in adulthood.

Dr. Rahul Jandial, neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, and author of This is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals about Your Waking Life, says nightmares start between the ages of 5- and 10-years-old and are part of childhood. When they come back in adulthood, the reason is an emotional trigger.

What happens when we dream? Can we coax our brains to remember? And how can we learn to interpret what our dreams are trying to tell us?

what happens when we dream?

Dreams are remarkably similar all over the world and across time — regardless of urban or rural settings, language you speak, developing country or not, or wealth status. Many people experience falling, arriving late, or being chased. Dr. Janial writes, “Given this continuity of dreams across time and place, it seems reasonable to conclude that the characteristics and contents of dreams are baked into our DNA, a function of our neurobiology and evolution.”

Our dreams come in many shapes and sizes. There are daydreams and night dreams. There are nightmares and lucid dreams. Some people claim to never dream, but in reality everyone does, though not everyone remembers. We need to dream. If sleep deprived the first thing we do is create these nighttime narratives, whether we remember them or not.?

These nighttime narratives help us solve problems, come up with creative ideas, practice sports, and help us discover more about who we are. There are many stories of writers, scientists, and artists whose work involved harnessing the power of their dreams.

Steven King came up with The Shining while dreaming. He and his wife were the only two guests in a mountain resort hotel as it was closing for the season. He had a dream his three-year-old son was running through the halls screaming and being chased by a firehose. The nightmare woke him up. He recalls lighting a cigarette. “By the time I was done, the bones of a whole book were firmly set in my mind.”

As we fall asleep, our bodies and minds go through a switching of the guard as the nightshift comes on duty. Our body relaxes and becomes paralyzed (except for our eyes and heart). As Dr. Jandial describes, our brain’s reality checker turns way down, and our imaginative network lights way up. As we focus inward, our mind wanders looking for loose associations in our memory to attach to.

Until recently, sleep research assumed dreams only happened during the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) portion of sleep (~2 hours/night). New research shows when waking people up in dream labs, when all hooked up to machines measuring their brain activity, they dreamed during all phases of sleep. That’s up to a third of our lives spent dreaming. If we didn’t need sleep or dreams, wouldn’t we have evolved past them by now?

can we coax our brains to remember?

After reading Dr. Jandial’s book, I felt like I was missing a golden opportunity. I wanted like to learn how to guide my third-shift better. To spend time working personal relationship concerns from a new perspective, to move a creative project forward, or to check-in on my mental health status.

As for coaxing your brain to remember, Dr. Jandial suggests telling yourself: I will dream tonight. I will remember my dream. I will write it down. You can also prime your brain for creativity or problem-solving about 15 minutes before bed. The key is to craft an emotionally relevant creative project or problem.

Dr. Jandial refers to “sleep entry” as “a cocktail for creativity” and problem-solving. He also writes about a device from MIT to engineer sleep and dreams in a way to maximize creativity. The device wakes you up a couple minutes after falling asleep to capture your dreams while they are still fresh.

Coincidentally, I first learned of Will Dowd and the MIT device for this month’s thought echoes podcast in an article in Nautilus Magazine “Does Dream Inception Work?"

Will used the device 50 times to plant poetry dream seeds. I asked Will what patterns emerged. “The dreams always seemed to have their own agenda. As the dream seeds interact with things that happened during the day and what’s in my subconscious, they became a kind of swarm. A natural phenomenon creating its own shapes with its own trajectory and bizarre plots. They had their own sense of time.”

When Will wrote up short poetic stories from the dream sequences, he felt he had a co-author, “…but my subconscious doesn’t have a name. It felt like a fingerprint from another part of me.”

For the rest of us who don’t have access to the device, Dr. Jandial encourages us to remain still for a moment after we wake-up. To write or type down every thing we remember while still in bed. We have one or two minutes before our reality network comes online. Initially we may start with fleeting fragments. Be patient. After a couple days or a week the fragments will get longer.

And for those who think once a day isn’t enough opportunity to catch your dreams, what about taking naps? Or, if you get up in the middle of the night, why not use those times to record your dream fragments too?

how can we learn to interpret what our dreams are trying to tell us?

After reading Ernest Hartmann, MD’s paper “The Dream Always Makes New Connections: The Dream is a Creation, Not a Replay,” my curiosity to step back into dream recording mode perked up.

Dr. Hartmann asserts that dreams as neither random nor a replay of daytime events. Our brains take bits from our days, people we’ve encountered, information from books and media we’ve consumed, our emotions at this moment in our lives, then weave all the fragments into our memories as a creative, cohesive, symbolic narrative.

These nighttime stories make new connections — they are a creation. Dreams are portals to our inner-selves and our mental health. He asks, “Who is best poised to interpret the emotional resonance of our own dreams, but each of us?“

When Dr. Hartmann described how a character in your dream reminds you of one person, then suddenly is someone else. How places shift and combine, you can be in one location one moment and another moment it’s as if walking into another room and you are someplace else.

The brain works in semantic maps like clusters of grapes. Transportation in a dream may morph from a train into a car, or with dwellings a house might change into a school. Again, think of what metaphor that image conjures up for you and what possible meaning does it have in this moment of your life.

He shared research of why nightmares develop between the ages of 5- and 10- years-old, as kids start working through their sense of self and their imaginary friend activity picks up. How nightmares as adults recur when an emotional situation triggers us in our adult life.

With my nightmare about the little girl running toward a cliff, when they came back in adulthood, I now know the reason. That repeated sequence embodied my feeling of helplessness. Back then to save my sister from cancer. As an adult during times I did not feel in control — up popped the nightmare.

Sometimes they were around the anniversary of my sister’s death, other times when my girls were the same age and I knew I couldn’t save them from everything that could hurt them. Still other times, they were work related during acquisitions and mergers. Now I understand why I kept having them.

During the ’90s when I learned about lucid dreaming, I went back into the nightmare and changed the narrative. I ran faster and caught up with the little girl. She stopped. We jumped off the cliff together as the cliff morphed into a roller coaster ride. I held her tight and kept her safe. In some versions we were even laughing and having fun. When my granddaughters start having nightmares in a few years, I feel better prepared to help them understand.

Dreams invite us to look deeper into ourselves and contemplate their messages. As Dr. Jandial concludes, “…reflecting on dreams is an important aspect of a life lived fully.”

WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS. WHAT DREAMS YOU HAVE?

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How can we make more meaningful choices?

Src: Unsplash Robert Anasch

When I was old enough to walk the mile to our neighborhood pharmacy, I took my babysitting money to buy candy. A time-lapse movie would have shown me standing frozen in front of a large display of hundreds of candies, and in the background kids would come and go. They’d grab their selections seemingly on a lark, pay the teenager behind the register, and skip out of the store with their friends.

But for me … if I chose the Baby Ruth (my favorite), then I couldn’t try the Butterfingers (one of my sister’s favorites) or Marathon bars (another sister’s favorite) or, or, or. I fidgeted with my babysitting dollars, as a thin layer of fear hovered around me.

I don’t remember my thought process. Maybe it was being brought up in an environment where I worked hard as a student to get the “right” answer, or was comparing myself to others. Maybe I was second guessing myself by going for the same thing every time. Or, somewhere in my tween-year-old brain, picking one meant missing out on another.

What is choice? Why are we sometimes afraid to make a choice? And how can we make more meaningful choices in our lives?

what is choice?

We can only choose when there’s something to compare and contrast. Even if we think we’re only deciding on one thing - like whether to go for a walk, there’s an automatic mirror-choice to compare against — “not” to go for a walk. There isn’t always a simple answer. There can be many factors playing into our decision like: weather, time, access, or I just don’t feel like it.

We make choices every day. Big ones and little ones. Simple and complex. Options that affect only us, and those that affect other people too — once we become aware of our choice ripple-effects.

What if we spent more time framing our options with a well-formed question? Could that help us determine which alternative feels more right, at the moment?

A decade ago, my husband and I had a side-gig (a neighborhood development project) where we kept beating our hopeful heads against a wall of costs. We were caught up in our excitement about building on a lot filled with family memories. We held the vision of rooftop gardens overlooking downtown through oodles of scenarios. Beautiful ideas that lured us by night, but required too many zeroes come morning.

Out of the blue, a woman contacted us — asking if she could store a historic mansion on our lot while she searched for a permanent location. We laughed at the idea of babysitting a gigantic house and psyched ourselves up for another round of scenario planning, sure we’d find a way.

The next morning my husband asked: What if we moved the mansion?

What happens in the moments before we make a choice? What if we could slow down time around the actual decision — does our body make the choice before our mind catches up to talk about it?

why are we sometimes afraid to make a choice?

When you think of making a choice, do you get all excited by lots of options, or are you instantly overwhelmed by too many possibilities? Here in the US, we pride ourselves for having so much variety, from coffee to cars to entertainment.

Surprisingly, research shows that when we have an abundance of options, we tend to be less satisfied. The energy it takes to choose steals some of the pleasure away from the decision. From a psychological perspective, people would be happier with less choices according to Barry Schwartz in his Ted talk “The Paradox of Choice.” One of his tips when you have too many alternatives: pick “good enough” and stop chasing the elusive perfect option.

In the business world of rational decision-making, little credence is given to people following their intuition. That’s too woo-woo. Interesting, because in that same corporate world, concepts like business acumen in following your gut or the reverence given to the mysteries of creative endeavors are both highly valued.

In my podcast this month, I interviewed Emily Sadowski, PhD. She found that people trying to develop their leadership skills and those trying to develop their psychic intuition pursued the same type of inner work. Emily’s research set out to find a way to have a conversation about intuition in both worlds. I joked that at work, the closest you got to a discussion about intuition was if you talked to HR over a glass of wine at happy hour. Nobody in corporate would touch it decades ago.

Emily explains that pretty much everyone has an intuitive experience in their back pocket. Remember a time when you were thinking of a friend you hadn’t thought of in awhile and they reached out to you? Sometimes we might experience a fleeting feeling or a floating thought like my computer hasn’t been backed up in awhile and decide (or not) to back up our computer.

She encourages people to understand that intuition is highly personalized. Some of us get our intuition hits through thoughts, others colors, still others body sensations. Some people have a very future-oriented big picture vision of what to do, while other people just happen to know the next right step. And sometimes there’s a sense of now’s not the right time to make a choice.

Next time there’s a decision to make, Emily suggests taking time to review our options, then check in with how our body reacts. Does it get all tingly and excited? Emily says to take that as a YES. If our body cringes or we recoil. She suggests to take that as a NO.

Whether we’re overanalyzing, afraid we’ll pick the wrong option, or nervous about ripple effects — an orchestrated pause for self-reflection can help.

how can we make more meaningful choices?

According to Elaine Dundon in “Making Wise Choices: The Key to a Meaningful Life,” every moment is a choice along the path to meaning. Some of the myriad selections we make every day have little impact. While others may greatly alter our circumstances and overall sense of satisfaction.

Elaine speaks of an important space. The gap right before we make a choice. Often, an impulsive reaction doesn’t provide the mental headroom for the reflection needed for a more meaningful alternative.

How many times have I knee-jerk reacted wishing I’d taken a beat? When I ask my husband a question and there’s silence, I often push for a response. He recently said, I’m processing.

I took a pause to let it sink in …

I’m processing seems more honoring for both of us — it communicates I heard you and allows more time to work through whatever is needed. Sometimes it’s hours and sometimes it’s days. But either way, a more thoughtful choice in how to respond percolates to the top.

Sometimes we have a hard choice to make. We want a particular outcome, but don’t know which option will create the desired effect. There’s an element of uncertainty involved because we don’t know what will happen because we haven’t chosen yet.

There’s a better question to ask coaches Nancy Collier in “A Better Way to Make Hard Choices.” What growth opportunities will each alternative extend to you? No decision is a guarantee of an outcome anyway, so which option interests you more or triggers more excitement?

***

When my husband asked, What if we moved the mansion? I wondered if the risk would be too much with everything going on in our family and work lives. But there was something else in the pause before answering — an improbable possibility. The opportunity to save a 100-year-old historic mansion held itself up like a dare, an invitation for an adventure.

My body knew first. A smile started deep inside me. Among the myriad choices I made everyday, I knew this would be a big one.

PLEASE COMMENTS BELOW. HOW DO YOU HANDLE MAKING CHOICES?

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How can accepting uncertainty help us?

Src: Unsplash Jamie Street

My grade school girlfriend sat on the washer in our laundry room. She’d stopped by after school to hang out. I stood holding a folded piece of purple-lined paper. She reached for the note as the dryer thumped away next to her. I leaned against an oversized countertop above six cubicles with laundry baskets. We could hear my sisters playing around the corner, but I wanted privacy so we ducked in here.

The note had a yarn attached to it from hanging outside my second-story bedroom window last night. A group of kids from school planned to meet at midnight, but no one showed up. I came back home, wrote the note, and dropped it out of my window in case I got the time wrong.

I waited for my friend to finish. She said something about one of the boys couldn’t make it, and they never got around to telling me. Sorry. Tonight? We’d try again tonight.

She left through the front door. As I turned around, there stood Mom in her black cat-eye glasses, holding the purple secret in her outstretched hand. Quiet. Still. As if to make sure I was listening. “What’s this?”

I paused, hesitated for a second, then leaned in and gently took the note. Opened it slowly. Pretending to read. My mind scrambling, trying to not look her in the eyes. Oh, we make up stories. Silence. Sounds of my sisters behind her.

My face flushed as I went upstairs to do my homework. I could feel Mom’s eyes watching me. She didn’t push me for more information, I was uncertain of what she’d do, but I knew I hadn’t heard the last of it.

What happens in moments of uncertainty? How do or could we respond? Is there an upside to embracing uncertainty that helps our mental health while navigating through life?

what happens in moments of uncertainty?

We humans do not like uncertainty. Many studies have shown people would rather get an electric shock now than maybe be shocked later. It’s as if the uncertainty becomes an energy in its own right, hovering beside us. There are all kinds of uncertainties we face in the world today. Happy uncertainties like anticipating a birthday celebration or a long awaited vacation.

But often, if not usually, it seems uncertainty tips towards the dark side of the spectrum. We’re uncertain about the future for ourselves and those we love. We worry about people’s health, the political environment, and have angst over climate volatility.

During this month’s thought echoes podcast, I spoke to Diana Raab, author of Hummingbird. Diana shares how the power of being open to the uncertainties and the synchronicities in our lives brings surprises, and often healing and closure.

During the uncertainty of the pandemic it was hard for her to write. She’s had health issues creating more unpredictability into her life. There was this hummingbird that kept hovering outside her window. Diana said she felt energetically connected to her grandmother through that small fluttering creature. She felt compelled to explore what it was all about. Why now?

When we talked about our thoughts echoing through time, in this case with her grandmother, she said “It’s mystical. It’s magical — a sort of vibrational feeling. It’s not something concrete.”

When I asked Diana what advice she would give? She encouraged all of us to be open to synchronicities in times of uncertainty. “Life is too short to be regimented. I tell people to follow their heart — that our minds play games with us.”

how could we respond to uncertainty?

What if we expected there will be uncertainty, that we can't plan our way in-to or out-of every situation. Does that reduce the stress around the waiting time? How would we spend that time otherwise?

There's a productive element of preparation and scenario planning in unpredictable times. There's also a moment where it turns into an obsessive hamster wheel of worrying, which does not feel productive. The what ifs lean to one side of the teeter-totter and your butt gets stuck in the mud because you've lost your positive partner, she's jumped off to play with someone else. What else could I do with the time I spend worrying instead?

If I let uncertainty in as an invitation, it feels more playful and adventuresome than having to constantly by on my guard. Why is that? Because I have a sense of control by inviting it into my day? Or am I just more open-minded and more relaxed, not so rigidly ready to react?

is there an upside to embracing uncertainty that helps while navigating life?

When we’re uncertain, trying to keep an open mind is hard. It’s difficult to keep the worry at bay, especially if you’re low on sleep. In Maggie Jackson’s New York Times essay, “How to Thrive in an Uncertain World,” based on her book Uncertain, she cites Rebecca Solnit, a writer and activist in her book Hope in the Dark, who proposes that “in the spaciousness of uncertainty there is room to act.” It’s through uncertainty itself that forms the basis for all hope. “Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the knowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.”

According to Nicole Whiting in her article “The Power of Embracing Uncertainty,” she explains how uncertainty and the unknown are usually viewed with apprehension. For some, uncertainty causes anxiety, fear or what might happen when they don’t have enough information or don’t feel in control of an outcome.

Maggie also writes, Paul K.H. Han, a National Cancer Institute senior scientist says, “it’s all about resetting our expectations of what knowledge is” and developing “A culture of uncertainty tolerance.” Learning to value open-mindedness, flexibility, and curiosity when being unsure should be valued. Often there is not one right answer, so hanging out in the uncertain space allows us to investigate alternatives, see different perspectives.

Nicole offers practical steps for embracing uncertainty:

Cultivate curiosity — what can you explore and learn

Practice patience — honor the journey of discovery

Have your own back — develop a resilient relationship with failure and uncertainty is required for personal growth

We all seek control (which is an illusion) and ironically if we release control in always having to know the right answer or doing the right thing, we build resilience and have an opportunity to grow.

***

Back to that purple-lined paper secret note my Mom found. When Dad came home, she showed him the note in his den. With the door closed. Upstairs I’d heard his car engine going into the garage, but kept repeating the same sentences in whatever textbook I was reading, listening for my name to be called.

My mind ricocheted around how I could make them know it was not a big deal. I knew I had done something wrong and had no idea what my punishment would be, but I knew that I would be punished. I felt guilty. It’s not like I wanted the electric shock, but I wanted to get it over, whatever my punishment would be.

Beth. My dad called from the front hall. I could hear the sternest in his voice through my closed door. I straightened my uniform skirt, pushed back my chair, and took a deep breath.

Downstairs in the den with the door closed, I stood across from Mom and Dad sitting in Captain’s chairs. Dad held out the note? “What’s this?” But this time I didn’t lie. I spilled the truth. Said it was no big deal. We only went to the farmland in the undeveloped subdivision about 10 minutes away. We only drank Coke and ate Oreos.

After I was grounded and had all my privileges taken away, the one that hurt the most was having to drop softball. I wasn’t great, but I enjoyed pitching. Not sure whose idea it was, but I knew it was wrong. Somehow I didn’t feel guilty until I was caught. As a kid in grade school I had no idea what I put my parents through.

I don’t remember them telling me how unsafe it was, I just remember the lie and how much that hurt them. I didn’t meant to hurt them. I didn’t know how scared they were until later. And again when I became a parent.

All the uncertainties parents endure with trying to keep their kids safe. I’ve learned we all have different tolerances for uncertainty, being open and curious helps, and parents will worry.

PLEASE COMMENTS BELOW. HOW DO YOU HANDLE UNCERTAINTY?

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