Kelly Flanagan's Blog, page 3
July 16, 2022
Zoom Room Connector | Zoom.Zoom Room Connector
Zoom room connector download –
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Skip to main content. Download Center. Zoom Client for Meetings The web browser client will download automatically when you start or join your first Zoom meeting, and is also available for manual download here. Zoom Plugin for Microsoft Outlook The Zoom Plugin for Outlook installs a button on the Microsoft Outlook tool bar to enable you to start or schedule a meeting with one-click.
View tutorial for more information. Zoom Extension for Browsers The Zoom Extension for Browsers allows you to start or schedule your Zoom meeting with a single click from your browser or within Google calendar. Currently available for Chrome and Firefox. Zoom Mobile Apps Start, join and schedule meetings; send group text, images and push-to-talk messages on mobile devices.
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Download in. Zoom Rooms for Conference Rooms and Touchscreen Displays Install the Zoom Rooms Win application to setup your conference room for one-touch meeting and calendar integration.
What are Zoom Rooms?.
Watch video. Enable SIP or H. Deliver a simplified workflow for your Polycom or Cisco room system with one touch to start or join your Zoom meeting. Include remote participants on desktop, mobile, or other conference room systems.
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July 5, 2022
The 3 Reasons We Bury Our Dreams
Sometime shortly after the Y2K bug did not end civilization, my girlfriend handed me a novel called A Widow for One Year by John Irving.
I’d read many novels before, and I’d enjoyed them, but none had ever so deeply attuned me to what is sacred and sad and hilarious and hard and beautiful and broken and grueling and graceful about being human. The book humanized me. All of that to say, overnight, a dream was awakened in me.
I wanted to write a novel.
At the time, I was working on a Masters thesis, shopping for an engagement ring for that girlfriend of mine, and generally obsessed with having as much fun as possible in whatever time was left over. Suddenly, though, fun meant skipping a party on a Saturday night to stay home and write. I can’t remember how much I eventually wrote because, eventually, I married that girlfriend and we had our first child while launching our careers. At some point, I buried the novel on a long-lost hard drive and I can’t even remember what it was about. I stand by that decision. I had a family to start and a career to get off the ground. My energies were needed elsewhere.
What I question is how deeply I buried that dream in my psyche.
When I was pitching Loveable, one of the acquisition editors described our passions as “the things we never knew we always wanted to do.” Yep. You can have a passion for writing a novel for twenty years and not even know it. You can have a passion for anything for a lifetime and not even know it. Why? Because of what we believe about our passions. They’re not practical. They’re a luxury. They’re selfish. They’re silly. They don’t matter. They’re not lucrative. They’re not applauded. And on and on.
We bury our dreams beneath a bunch of quite reasonable reasons for burying them, and eventually we forget they are there altogether.
In August of 2020, after publishing True Companions, it was time to pitch the second non-fiction book of a two-book contract to my publisher. I was confident in the concept and hopeful the publisher would approve it, but also prepared for disappointment. I was not prepared for what they actually said:
“We think this would work better as fiction.”
It was a dream come true, so of course I jumped at the opportunity, right? Wrong. I told them I must not have been clear enough. I revised the non-fiction proposal and resubmitted it. Again, why? Why actively work to keep my dream buried? Perhaps because one of the only things worse than not chasing your dream is chasing it and not catching it. A heart full of hope is easier to handle than a heart broken by disappointment.
We preserve the perfection of our passions by not practicing them.
So, I submitted a second non-fiction proposal, confident this time my publisher would see the light. They didn’t. Their feedback was unchanged: “We still think this would work better as fiction.”
The dream within me began to stir. Could I? Could I really? Could I really write a novel? I put my head together with my trusted agent. She cautioned me that most authors have several novels in the drawer before they master the craft well enough to actually pull one off, but she encouraged me to get started anyway. So, I did. And her reaction to the early pages fanned the embers of that old dream of mine:
“Your characters. They’re alive. Keep going!”
So, I did. And writing The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell became the greatest thrill of my creative life. I would plan for the characters to do one thing and they’d do something entirely different—something somehow more real and more truthful and more meaningful than I’d had in mind—and I’d feel like I was the only one in the theater on opening night, watching a heart-rending story unfold before anyone else gets to see it.
Then, five months later, the first draft was done.
I went for a walk with a friend a couple of days later and told him I’d finished it. He asked if I’d sent it to my agent yet. I told him no, and I might never send it. He asked why. I told him publishing a novel just didn’t make sense for me at this point in my career. I wanted to publish a book about pursuing our passions. He looked at me and said, “How can you write a book about pursuing your passion if you’re not pursuing yours?” Touche.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been more conscious of what Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance” than I was in that moment. Pressfield writes, “The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows we’re about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it’s got.”
There is a Force in the universe that planted a passion or passions inside of our souls. And Resistance—whatever it might be, probably some amalgam of our wounds and shame and fear and ego—is aligned against our passions. It wants to keep our dreams buried safely away in our psyches.
In the end, I didn’t write a book about pursuing our passions. Rather, the book itself is an example of one guy doing it, twenty years after the idea first enthralled him. I’m really proud of the shape this long-buried dream of mine has ultimately taken in the world. And I can’t wait for you to read it.
Elijah’s story has made me a more peaceful, forgiving, and faithful human being. I believe it will do the same for you, too.
You can click here to find out more about it and read what people are saying about it.
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June 17, 2022
Sneak Peek: The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell
This excerpt taken from The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell: A Novel by Kelly Flanagan. Copyright (c) 2022 by Kelly Flanagan. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
PrologueThe past is behind us but it is also, always, within us. Which means the past can feel dead and gone one moment and then, in the next, it can be very much living and breathing and here. My past came back to life in the form of a nightmare I hadn’t dreamed in over thirty years.
When I was a child, the nightmare always began the same way, with me standing at a river’s edge, watching it rush by, brownly opaque with mud, swollen with storm debris, and foamy with turmoil. It was the kind of cataclysmic river in which a kid could disappear without warning, carried downstream to rot in some unpredictable destination. An old wooden bridge spanned the river. Though it had probably been a feat of humankind at its creation, its glory days were clearly behind it. The railings were gone. Most of the walkway had been torn away by storms long forgotten. The remaining planks were rotted and loose and spaced out, some resting where they were originally placed, some resting at angles. Large gaps in the walkway revealed the roiling waters just a few yards below it.
Beyond the bridge, the other side of the river was always cloaked in fog. I had no idea what the fog hid, and yet—with the kind of certainty that can only be called faith, the kind of anticipation that can only be called hope, and the kind of longing that can only be called love—I wanted to find out. So I’d look down, preparing to take my first step, and I’d see on my feet a pair of worn-out blue sneakers with yellow trim. They were so dirty the yellow looked almost brown and the blue looked almost black. The shoe on my right foot had a hole at the front of it, and my big toe protruded, covered by a dusty sock.
Every night, the dream seemed to contain all its previous renditions, so I knew exactly how it was going to end. I knew I would step out onto the bridge and the water would rise and it would be impossible to escape it and, as it reached me, I would silently scream myself awake. However, I also knew I’d step out onto the bridge anyway, yearning so much for the opposite shore that I was willing to endure the familiar terror at least one more time.
Sometime around middle school, the dream seemed to die. I went to sleep one night, and it didn’t go with me. Weeks passed. No nightmare. Then months passed, then years, and somewhere along the way I forgot about that old nightmare altogether. It turns out, though, it hadn’t died. It had simply gone dormant. Or maybe it had died, and almost three decades later, on the cusp of my fortieth birthday, it was resurrected.
I don’t think the future is ever predetermined but I do think our futures are eventually determined by what we do with these moments of resurrection, especially when such moments cluster together, forming a sort of bridge in the middle of our life, one we may cross to new ground, or one we may turn back from, retreading the ground from which we came. My bridge was made of that old nightmare. It was also made of a secret I kept from everyone so long I eventually began to keep it from myself, and a secret that was kept from me for so long I never knew it existed. My bridge was made of a bunch of lost loved ones who came to life again within the magic of memory and the mystery of imagination. It was made of a God I once loved who went silent, and then one day started speaking to me again through those beloved ghosts of mine.
In the Bible, Jesus dies on a Friday, and there’s a lot of talk about that. Then he’s resurrected on a Sunday, and there’s even more talk about that. No one talks much about Saturday, though. Death and resurrection. No one talks much about the and that bridges the two. Sometimes, though, all of life can begin to feel like an and. Every day can start to feel like the Saturday between what happened to you and what you will—or will not—do with it. And once you recognize your bridge for what it is, you have to decide whether you’ll cross it, with no guarantees of surviving the passage, just the merest of hopes that it will deliver you to more graceful ground. It took me a long time to recognize my and—my Saturday, my bridge—for what it was. Too long. It began with a leg in my lap, more than a decade before the nightmare resumed.
My name is Elijah Campbell, and this is the story of my unhiding.
Want to read more? You can click here to read and/or download a PDF of the next chapter.
Want to preorder the book? You can click here to order it.
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June 2, 2022
The Words We All Still Need to Hear
It’s May and endings are everywhere.
Aidan is graduating from high school. Quinn is graduating from eighth grade, which means he’s graduating from youth soccer, which means I’m graduating from eight years as his coach. We are just days away from the last practice I’ll ever lead and the last game in which I’ll ever be allowed to shout like a madman on the sidelines.
It makes the ritual of the Awords feel particularly precious.
The Awords are a tradition I started years ago. Every season, after the parent-player scrimmage which concludes the final practice, we order pizza and hand out a kind of award I call an Aword. Each player gets a certificate with a word that reflects something delightful about who they are, along with three synonyms and a benediction. It is not a recognition of their performance, it is a celebration of their personhood.
On a Tuesday afternoon, at a weekly staff meeting with my employees, I’m sharing all of this when I get unexpectedly choked up. Why? Because I thought the ritual would end years ago. I figured when the kids entered middle school and became too cool for almost everything, they’d quit being interested in the Awords. I was wrong. In fact, as middle schoolers, they sit in even greater anticipation, waiting to hear what words will be bestowed upon them.
We are never too old, it seems, to be seen and understood and lovingly named, and the truth of this stirs something in the depths of me.
A few hours later, I’m in the midst of another ending. It’s Aidan’s final spring choir concert. The students all sing beautifully, and then their choir director lines the seniors up on the stage. It’s her first year as the director, but she is starting a new tradition: each senior will be given three words to describe them, and a benediction. Before she begins, I have a moment to wonder if the high schoolers have outgrown their interest in this kind of thing. But only a moment. Because one after another she declares their words, and one after another they start crying.
We are never too old to be seen, and understood, and lovingly named.
This scene is still lingering with me two days later, on Thursday afternoon, as I keynote an online summit for fathers and share the story of how an important truth first dawned on me. I’d been blogging for a couple of years when a letter to my daughter went really viral, and the two of us wound up on the TODAY Show. As a result of that appearance, I got connected with a wonderful literary agent who suggested that, because my letters to my kids were resonating so much, I should write a parenting book. I shared this with my wife, who is a child psychologist, and she told me had no business writing a book on parenting. I knew she was right, and it made me curious: if it wasn’t the parenting element of the letters that was moving people, what was it?
I sifted through the thousands of emails I was getting at the time and I realized the vast majority of them were not saying, “I’m going to save this letter for my daughter,” or, “I’m going to write a letter like this to my grandchildren.” The vast majority of them were from adult men and women saying, I needed to read these words. I needed to be reminded that I’m worthy, that I have value, that I’m not alone, that I belong, that I matter, that I have a reason for being here. I needed to be reminded that I’m loveable. That’s when it hit me:
We all still have a little kid inside of us waiting on a love letter.
Just a few hours after I shared that story at the summit, our parent-player scrimmage is already over—the adults are nursing hamstrings that will only become more sore over the coming day, the kids are devouring pizza—and I begin reading out the Awords. As always, when the kids begin to realize what’s happening, they drop their pizza and wait eagerly with a single question written all over their faces…what kind of words will be spoken about me? I’ll never forget the widening of the eyes of the quietest kid on the team when I started reading his words. It was a look of wonder.
Two days later, it’s Saturday morning—just an hour before I will coach my last game of youth soccer—and I decide to give out one more Aword. I give it to the little one who still lives on inside of me. I picture him, as a young child, sitting in a pile of his books in his bedroom, his parents telling him he has to put them all away if he wants to eat dinner, and him refusing. He’s the part of me that refuses to give up on his passion for books and his dream of writing them. He’s so stubborn he’ll choose his stories over food! And I love him so much for that. So, I give him the word “stubborn,” and inside of me, a little boy’s eyes widen with wonder, because he’s always been made to feel ashamed of his stubbornness, but for the first time he’s seeing the beauty in it.
“The past is behind us, but it is also, always, within us.” So begins my first novel, The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell, and I suppose a phrase like that could sound a little ominous. But really it’s the most hopeful of promises. Because the past contains your youngest, truest, worthiest, most loveable self. There is still a little one inside of you waiting on a love letter. What do they need to hear?
And why wait another day to say it to them?
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May 5, 2022
What You Haven’t Heard About Will Smith
You probably think you’ve heard everything there is to say about Will Smith.
You haven’t.
Nor have you heard the most important part of it.
On the afternoon of March 27, I finished Will Smith’s memoir. I thoroughly enjoyed the first two-thirds of it, but as I’d drawn closer to the end of it, I’d grown uneasy, though I couldn’t quite articulate why. Then, a few hours after finishing it, my family and I watched live the slap heard round the world.
Stunned, I checked Twitter, because it’s the speediest news outlet in the world. A recording of the incident had already been posted from Australia, where they didn’t censor the scene for their audience. Will Smith had clearly assaulted Chris Rock in front of 12 million people. And, finally, I was clear about why the end of his memoir had bothered me, and I understood what had happened at the Oscars:
A younger version of Will Smith had pushed its way into the present.
Our adult self is created in a three-stage process. First, we arrive in the world with a true self that was created for us. It was made by love and for love, to give love and to get love. This original version of ourselves considers its lovability self-evident.
Then, our true self encounters pain and shame in one form or another. Abandonment, rejection, abuse, or simply the loneliness of feeling unseen and misunderstood. In the midst of it, a new and wounded version of us begins to form. If the first version of us was the lover, this version of us is the loner, and its lovability is always in question.
In the third stage, we begin creating versions of ourselves to hide, defend, and prove the worthiness of our inner loner. This goes on for many years. Layers and layers of identity. A sedimentary self. Gradually, our inner world becomes crowded with the many versions of ourselves. There are hiders in there. And fighters. And rulers. Chameleons and conquerors. Damsels and dictators. This, in and of itself, is not a problem. In fact, it’s normal, even ubiquitous. We’ve all got a gathering of younger selves within us.
The problem isn’t the gathering, it’s the urge to eliminate it.
Near the end of Will Smith’s memoir, he talks about a journey of self-discovery: he went on multiple retreats, read a library’s worth of wisdom books, and completed fourteen ayahuasca ceremonies. In the process, he reconnected with his true self—that spacious and gracious original self from which all of his other selves sprang—and that is a beautiful thing. However, I was troubled by the implication that, having rediscovered his true self, he could somehow jettison all the other versions of himself. That mindset is a recipe for disaster.
You can’t uncreate the versions of yourself you’ve already created.
As much as you’d like to, you can never really put the past behind you. That’s why the first line to my new novel is, “The past is behind us, but it is also, always, within us.” We don’t get to simply delete the most troublesome or most painful parts of our story. Nor can we erase the versions of us that lived that story.
Moreover, trying to do so perpetuates the very same rejection that gave rise to them in the first place. More rejection equals more shame. More shame equals more need for the very versions of us we created in order to cope with shame. Not to mention, if you tell yourself you can eliminate them—and you believe you’ve done so—then your inner fighter might just show up when you least expect it and slap someone without your permission.
About a month before the slap heard round the world, I was facilitating a small couples retreat when a younger version of myself pushed its way into the present. I didn’t know what was happening at first. I rarely get anxious when I speak anymore, but I was sweating, noticeably. Then I got panicky about everyone noticing I was sweating. So I started to sweat more. I wanted to crawl under a rock but I couldn’t, because I was in the spotlight.
So instead I took a moment, and a breath, and I realized my little loner was feeling what he always feels: like he doesn’t belong. He feels unprepared for people with class and manners and inside jokes. He feels like he’s on the outside and missing some essential key to getting on the inside. Sitting there in the spotlight, I so much wanted him to go away, to never have existed at all, which of course is a lonely thing to do to a lonely little guy. So, instead, I did what I knew he needed: I welcomed him into the moment.
Instead of trying to eliminate the younger versions of who we are, we must welcome them.
Instead of hiding, I told the participants what I was experiencing, and the next day I told them why it had happened: we all have a younger version of ourselves always pushing its way into the present. If we try to eliminate those younger versions, they’ll have no guidance to go by when they show up. They’ll just do what they do. But if we welcome them, learn how to relate to them, love each and every one of them, then we can all work together.
For what it’s worth, I’ve forgiven Will Smith for being a lot like me: for having younger versions of himself that push their way into the present, for thinking he could eliminate them, and for having to learn the hard way that there’s really only one way to heal:
The welcoming is the healing.
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March 28, 2022
Tick, tick, tick. Space. Grace. Breakthrough.
The house is quiet for the first time in eighteen months.
Minutes earlier, all three of my kids had departed for in-person, full-time schooling for the first time since the whole world went quiet all those months ago. A year and a half of COVID and quarantine, of work-from-home and home schooling—all five of us in one small space doing all of life together. The world might have been a little more quiet for a while, but our house sure wasn’t. So, I’m just resting in the tranquil space for a few moments, when I hear it.
Tick, tick, tick.
At first, I ignore it. After all, I’ve got things to do and—for the first time in a long time—an uninterrupted morning in which to do them. I get down to work. Tick, tick, tick. I keep writing. Tick, tick, tick. I make a phone call. Tick, tick, tick. I grab a snack. Tick, tick, tick. Finally, the sound is irresistible. I listen. Tick, tick, tick. I get up and follow the ticking and locate the culprit: a battery-powered, tabletop clock whose battery is too low to push the second hand to the next second.
In that clock, I see myself and I see all of us.
Our batteries are low, aren’t they? We’re stuck so to speak, in one way or another, but amidst the hustle and bustle and clutter and clatter of life, we don’t even notice the symptoms of it. Indeed, it isn’t until a blessed moment of spaciousness comes along that we become aware of our depletion, and its implications for our transformation, or lack thereof.
And yet.
Where can you find a little space these days? We’re inundated with demands for our attention. Inundated with calls for our anxiety, triggers for our anger, temptations toward distraction. Inundated by the precariousness of the world and the pain of existence, not to mention the pleasures of being alive.
It’s why I went away to a retreat center in 2011, on the cusp of something new in my life, but (tick, tick, tick) not quite sure what it was or how to get there. By the second morning of the retreat, I was almost crawling out of my skin in search of answers—speed-reading through books I’d brought, scratching out useless notes in a journal. The ticking grew louder as the morning progressed. Then, in an inexplicable fit of sanity and grace, I took a deep breath and asked, “What do I really want to do this morning?” and the answer came echoing across the decades: “I want to go for a walk in the woods, like at my Grandma’s house when I was a boy.”
So, I put down my books and my journal and I went for a walk in the forest adjacent to the retreat grounds, and I was a man and a boy all at once and I knew, suddenly, without a doubt, there is still a little one living on in all of us, hoping to live this life along with us, if only we’ll invite them to do so.
Tick, tick, tick. Space. Grace. Breakthrough.
It’s also why I hosted the 2019 Loveable Retreat weekend at the 4U Ranch outside Park City, Utah, along with its owners Donna and Gary Urban. It’s why, when I walked into their ranch house for the first time—nestled into its 75 acres, backdropped by a mountain face with eagles soaring around its peak, a fly-fishing stream the only dividing line between their back yard and the wild, all visible through the retractable glass rear wall of the house, the whole ranch infused with the welcoming presence of the Urbans themselves—I knew the experience would be transformational for our guests. And it was. The place was the epitome of the space we all needed. And the conversations we had, the learning we did, the meals we shared, the laughter we laughed—the opportunities for hikes and fly-fishing and stargazing—all of it was like an inexplicable fit of sanity, of grace.
It’s also why we’re doing it again this October, though this time we’re calling it Companion Camp. In the last three years, the world has become exponentially more clamorous, and life it seems has become even more tenuous. We need graceful spaces of renewal and connection and transformation, now more than ever.
Tick, tick, tick. Space. Grace. Breakthrough.
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March 1, 2022
How to Find Belonging (Either Beautifully or Violently)
We’re watching security footage.
The image shows a parking lot sprawled out in front of our car. Several dots in the distance gradually materialize into three kids walking toward the camera. As they draw closer, their age becomes clear—they are in the nomad’s land of identity that is late middle school or early high school.
As they approach our car, talking and laughing, one kid points at our front bumper, walks toward it, and gives it a vicious kick, before they walk on and pass out of camera view.
My wife, forgetting for a moment what it was like to be that age, asks rhetorically, “Why would a kid do something like that?”
My daughter—who is just a little younger than those boys and keenly aware of what it’s like to be a tweenager—is standing behind us. Over my shoulder I can hear her whispered response to my wife’s question.
“Because he thinks his friends will like him more.”
The whole scene was about belonging. It’s always about belonging, Mom. Everything is about belonging, Dad. From the mouths of babes, or tweenagers at least.
It’s a quaint story when it’s about a group of kids in an almost empty parking lot way off in one quiet corner of civilization. It becomes a potentially life-changing story when you realize we’ve all still got a tweenager inside of us who is wondering if we’ll belong, and looking for ways to ensure we don’t end up alone.
Who do you become in order to attract companionship? What do you do in order to keep your companionship? Which so-called cars are you willing to kick in order increase the odds you end up unlonely? There’s no shame in admitting it. I’d like to say I’m comfortable enough in my own skin to not resort to such cheap tricks. But in the right moment with the wrong people and a particularly uncertain sense of myself, who knows what I’m capable of.
Around the time of the parking lot vandal, our family attended a conference for families. The keynote speaker was a young man named Nick Santonastasso. Nick was born with Hanhart syndrome, a rare condition that left him with no legs, one arm, and a single finger. That day, Nick told one story in particular that the tweenager in me will never forget. (Apologies to Nick if my recollection has morphed into something truer to my needs than to his story.)
Nick was booked on one of those airlines where passengers get to choose their own seat. As a person with a disability, he was invited to board first, and he chose a prime seat, right in the front of the plane. The flight attendant warned him, “These are good seats and we have a full flight—you’re going to have company right away, so get yourself situated as soon as you can.” Soon, the other passengers began boarding.
Every one of them looked at him, bypassed the prime seats next to him, and chose a lesser seat in the back of the plane.
Nicked turned to look out the window, not because there was something to see out there, but because he didn’t want his fellow passengers to see him crying. Feelings of ugliness and loneliness and unworthiness flowed from his tear ducts. Until, from somewhere deep within him, he heard a voice. This is what it said:
“Nick, your body isn’t working against you. It’s working for you. It’s screening out the people you don’t want in your life.”
There are at least two very different ways to find the people you belong to. The first is the way of a parking lot vandal and, sadly, most of our social media these days. It’s to kick all the metaphorical cars around you—to be angry and aggressive and violent and damaging and rejecting—and to hope those who are walking with you through the parking lot of life will like you a little more for all of your strength and ego.
The other way is to show up as you actually are, with all your countless imperfections and inabilities and insecurities—just laid bare, vulnerable, and alone—and to allow the rejecting of you to become the thing that purifies your circles of belonging. This takes a lot of faith—in yourself and your worthiness, in others and their goodness, in existence and its justice. After all, it wouldn’t be vulnerability if it didn’t require a little more faith than you’ve got. But in the end, that’s the beauty of it—it produces twice the rewards:
As your sense of belonging grows, your faith in everything else does, too.
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February 3, 2022
The Conversation with Your Life
I told you about my phrase for 2022, but I didn’t tell you about my word for our family this year.
In 2022, my youngest son will become a driver (he’ll get his permit in September), my oldest son will become an adult (in August he’s setting out on his great adventure, moving to Chicago, aspiring to become a comedian), and I’ll become a novelist (my first novel The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell is slated to be published this fall). The dictionary defines threshold as “any place or point of entering or beginning.”
Threshold. That’s our family’s word for the year.
As I reflected on this, I recalled a TED Talk given some years ago by the poet David Whyte, in which he tells the story of his niece’s trek along El Camino de Santiago and the rituals of reflection at the end of the journey. The first ritual asks you to ponder a question: “How did you follow the path to get here? How do you hold the conversation of life…that brought you to this place?”
I was struck by that phrase: “The conversation with your life.”
Our lives are a series of thresholds—doorways from what has been into what will be—and our stories are punctuated by the conversations we have on those thresholds. Not the conversations we have with others nor even with ourselves, but the conversations we have with the thresholds themselves, the conversation we have with our life in that very moment when everything has built up to something that is about to begin.
What if our wisest future emerges from a clear understanding of these past dialogues in our doorways?
I remember a morning in April 1999. For two months I’d been facing a choice: let my natural inclination toward the familiar win out and choose to stay at the University of Illinois for graduate school, or do something entirely new and go to Penn State. I awoke on the morning of the deadline and the first thought in my head was: “If I don’t go to Penn State, I’ll always wonder, what if?” I accepted the offer to Penn State that day.
On a threshold, the conversation with my life.
Six years later, near the end of my year-long clinical internship, finally on the verge of my career, my wife asked why I was procrastinating on revising my dissertation for publication, and I blurted out, “Because I don’t want to be a professor, I just want to see clients all day every day.” I started searching for a position in outpatient mental health.
On a threshold, the conversation with my life.
On a Sunday morning a couple of years later, I was contemplating whether or not to start my own practice or go to work for someone else. I prayed “What should I do?” and a voice like a whisper with me responded: “I don’t care, just take Me with you.” I knew right away that starting a practice at that point in my life was all about ego, and in ego there is not much room for the divine. I went to work for someone else.
On a threshold, the conversation with my life.
Four years later, the insurance company that accounted for most of my income suddenly cut their reimburse rate to me by 15%, eliminating all of my family’s financial margin. I scrambled for ways to increase our stability, ultimately deciding I needed to generate a referral stream beyond the insurance company, but wanting to do so while doing something I loved. I opened up a Word document. I wrote my first blog post.
On a threshold, the conversation with my life.
There have been countless thresholds in the ten years since then, countless conversations with my life while standing in those doorways. Conversations containing phrases like, “I want to write books!” and “I just want the beauty of a small, ordinary life,” and “I will no longer allow people to keep me small for their own gain,” and more recently, “I want to write a novel!”
On every threshold, we are in a conversation with our life.
I share this with you because what I did after watching that TED Talk brought me great clarity, and I believe it might do the same for you. I reflected on all of those conversations over the last twenty-some years, journaled the details of them, and then within seconds was able to summarize the conversation I’ve been having with my life over the last quarter of a century. It goes like this:
“I have to try something new, pursue what I love, trust my belovedness, and embrace the beauty of being ordinary.”
I’ve made it my life mission statement for 2022, and it didn’t come from deciding on a New Year’s resolution or determining my long-term goals. It came from reflecting upon the ongoing conversation with my life.
Are you on the threshold of something and looking for encouragement to take the next step? Or on the threshold of something but not entirely clear about what it is? Or do you have no idea where your doorways are, or where they might lead? If so, I’ve got good news for you. You don’t have to see into the future. You have to faithfully examine your past, your thresholds. And ask yourself two questions: “What is the conversation I’ve been having with my life?” And, “Which parts of that conversation would I like to continue?”
Welcome to the dialogue in your doorway.
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January 2, 2022
A Phrase to Focus Your Year (and an Invitation to a New Era)
Resolution.
The word is just so…oppressive. Instead, last year, I chose a focusing phrase for the year: “open-hearted presence.” All year, when I started to feel my heart close to an experience, I’d take a deep breath, open it back up, and neither attach to nor resist anything that was happening. The phrase and the practice changed my life.
This year, my phrase is “intentionally-focused community.”
Why am I telling you this? I’m telling you because I hope you’ll be encouraged to choose a focusing phrase for your year, and then practice it until being human becomes a little more beautiful. I’m also telling you because you are a part of the community I’m going to be particularly focused on this year.
What do I mean by that? I can explain it quickly, but to do so I’ll have to start ten years ago this week, when I published my first blog post.
The Beginning of the StorySix months before that day, a client of mine said, “Hey, these ideas of yours are really helping me. It’s a shame you only get to share them with thirty people a week.” I thought about that for a while.
Then I wrote my first blog post.
It took me almost a month and all of my courage to write those first 782 words and to push the publish button on the first Saturday morning of 2012. It took me six days to write my second post. Six hours to write my third. Six weeks later, my ninth blog post went viral.
In two months, I’d gone from reaching thirty people a week, to a million.
Several viral blog posts later, my daughter and I wound up on the TODAY Show. That morning, a well-known author saw us on the show and connected me to his agent. She very quickly became the guiding light of my literary life.
Three years later, Loveable was published.
Loveable has sold tens of thousands of copies and has been published in a second language. But even more importantly, it has become a magnet for the most graceful group of people I’ve ever known. I think of it as the Loveable Learning Community—LLC for short.
The Rest of the StoryIn the spring of 2018, the Loveable Learning Community gathered in the analog world for the first time in Waco, Texas, with Ashton and Brynn Gustafson. We called it the Loveable Retreat Weekend. There, Donna and Gary Urban offered to host the next retreat at their 4U Ranch, a short drive outside of Park City, Utah. Planning got underway.
In the meantime, the Loveable Learning Community began to gather on Facebook Live in the form of our weekly Human Hour conversation. It was graceful and inclusive and we picked up new friends every week.
In October 2019, forty of us gathered in Utah for the 2019 Loveable Retreat Weekend and, despite being a words-guy, I was left speechless. By its warmth and tenderness. By the quickly forged sense of belonging. By the very special nature of this growing community.
Then, to be frank, COVID triggered in me a digital identity crisis.
I was not interested in being yet another platform flooding the digital world with content. I was bothered by the limited depth and connection of Facebook Live gatherings. And analog gatherings were off the table for the foreseeable future.
So, in 2020, I hunkered down. I wrote a book that picked up where Loveable left off, exploring the boundary-lands between shame and loneliness, and the risks and rewards of lifelong belonging. In February 2021—despite pandemic fatigue, cultural upheaval, and countless other stressors—the Loveable Learning Community rallied around the launching of True Companions, and for that I will be forever grateful.
After the launch, I hunkered down again with my digital identity crisis, and my sense of clarity began to grow. In September, I announced my vision for my online presence. Then, last month, I completed a weeklong training about how to create and choreograph deeply meaningful online and analog gatherings.
From that training emerged a vision for the Loveable Learning Community in 2022…
The Next of the StoryIn 2022, the Loveable Learning Community is going to:
Replace Facebook Live with the depth and richness of monthly Zoom gatherings,gather again in-person for Companion Camp 2022 on October 15, at the 4U Ranch,and we are going to start a book club ahead of the publication of my first novel, The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell, which releases on October 18. There is as much to learn in this novel as there was to learn in Loveable, and I’ll be bringing a free copy of it for everyone in Utah!Of course, the activities of a community may not be as important as its pillars. Activities are the what of community; its pillars are the how. So, at this inflection point, let’s be clear about the pillars of this Loveable Learning Community. There are three of them, and they are right there in the name.
Loveable. We are here in this community not because we always feel loveable, but because we are on a journey toward that quiet center within us where our worthiness is self-evident. We are hoping to brush up against that center, perhaps even stand on the solid ground of it for a moment or two, and we are wildly hopeful that we might someday rest in it always.
Learning. We recognize we are lifelong learners and that residing peacefully in the space of unknowing is actually one of the deepest forms of wisdom. In the words of Elijah Campbell—or, more accurately, the ghost of his beloved grandfather—“I guess you could say, humility isn’t modesty about having arrived; it’s the acceptance that you never really will.” We seek to embody this kind of humility.
Community. We do not gather based upon shared beliefs, overly-simplistic political platforms, nor any of the exclusion all of that entails. We seek to be radically inclusive, with only one pre-requisite for participation: the desire to become a healthier person and a truer companion. We embrace how dramatically different we are from each other, and we view the occasional disagreement as an opportunity for deeper connection rather than defensive protection.
This is who we are.
And in 2022, I’m more intentionally focused on this community than ever. There are no membership fees. No expectations. (However, you will get an early access discount code for Companion Camp!) In order to receive occasional notifications of opportunities for deeper learning, growth, and connection, all you have to do is complete a quick three-question survey.
I’ve loved my first ten years with you. Can’t wait to see what we do together in the next ten!
Best,
Kelly
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December 4, 2021
Why Every Little Laugh Really Matters
I’m sitting at the kitchen table, on the eve of Advent, laughing with friends, knowing I’ll be waking up in the morning to write the eulogy for my wife’s grandmother.
In True Companions, I wrote about my wife’s grandparents—married 71 years, companions for 74. I wrote about how true companions help one another toward the finish line of life. I speculated that her beloved grandmother would be the one to finish first, because she was forgetting things at a startling pace.
Then, in January 2020, she became deathly ill. They ran all the tests we had at the time. It looked like the flu. It wasn’t. Everyone shrugged. She didn’t leave the hospital for three months, long after certain words and phrases had entered everyday usage: social distancing and sheltering in place and long Covid. She never really recovered and just before Thanksgiving of this year, she passed away.
I’m gazing out a window into the darkness of a Saturday evening, between laughs with our friends, and I marvel at the brilliance of the Christmas lights adorning the trees in front of our home, while I wonder what I can say in five minutes to capture the meaningfulness of a life, the beauty of 90 years well-lived.
The branches sway in a breeze. The lights dance. I stare at one light in particular and it, by itself, is entirely underwhelming.
Every light, in and of itself, is easy to overlook.
But a strand of lights. Connected to another strand of lights. Connected to thirty strands of lights. Then. Then you have to step back and take the whole thing in and hold your breath and wonder at how overlooked things can, together, become the only thing at which you want to look.
When my wife’s grandmother laughed, it didn’t change the world. But her cackle had the love of God in it and, for a moment, the world became a little brighter because of it. Ninety years. Countless overlooked laughs, but a whole life of laughter, a whole strand of lights.
I think about what my daughter has loved most about gathering with my wife’s side of the family: all of the women—four generations—sitting around a dining room table, laughing, until one of them declares they’ve almost wet their pants. My daughter delights in it. It’s about more than each ordinary laugh, more even than each strand of a life. It’s about plugging those strands of laughter end-to-end, across the years and the lifetimes and the generations, until it’s a spectacle of beauty from which you must step back, hold your breath, and marvel at what you can make when you string these things together.
That’s the meaning of it all. Each life is a strand, just a thread of laughter and light. The big beauty of every limited life is the way it connects what came before it to what will come after it.
Ninety years. A long, long strand, through which the energy of grace flows on, from the laughter before it, to the laughter beyond it.
I tune back in to our Saturday evening. My wife is laughing. Our friends are laughing. It’s just one moment. Just a single twinkle of laughter in the big, big black of existence, but my wife is putting together a strand of them, and so am I, and so are our friends.
Would you join us?
Laugh if you can. It’s just an ordinary thing. It doesn’t really matter. But also, it really does. Because taken together with the rest of your laughter, and the lives of laughter before you and after you, it might just be more beautiful than any of us can imagine, from within it.
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