When I was in college, I fell in love with the work of writer John Irving. One day, I came home (I lived with my family) from a full day of class and work to find a new, hard-cover copy of Irving’s The World According To Garp laying on my bed. The first page inside bore the inscription, “Jeni: Keep passing the open windows. Love, Dad”.

Dad was referencing another of Irving’s novels, The Hotel New Hampshire. In that novel, the phrase was used repeatedly to reference a suicide by one character, and for the surviving characters to remind themselves and others to avoid the temptation of opting out in the same way. The phrase stuck with me, as I’m sure it has for other readers of the novel, over the years. Occasionally, I have uttered it, sometimes to myself and sometimes to friends, at moments that were particularly stressful or trying.

After last night, I may never use the phrase in that way again.

I came home from a long haul at work, very tired and in need of some inspiration. As I sometimes do, I grabbed a random book off the shelf, and headed to the coffee shop for a hot Americano and some reading. It is an interesting game of trust in providence to put a good, maybe even “the right”, book in my hand when I do this. Almost every time I find something I need to hear or think about in the book I grab.

Last night, the book was Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom by John O’Donohue. I bought the book new, but have owned it long enough that the pages are yellowed. At some point, I clearly read the first three chapters, as I have underlined and made notations. But last night, perusing the table of contents, I saw a chapter titled, “Work as a Poetics of Growth”. Because my work life, and my professional future, have been so omnipresent lately, this chapter seemed a good place to commence random reading.

Early in the chapter, O’Donohue uses the image of a tower of windows to describe the “complexity of growth within the human soul”. He asks the reader to imagine a tower of windows, and sadly notes that many people remain stuck at one window, always looking at the “same scene in the same way”. He suggests that growth occurs when one draws away from that window, walks around the tower of the soul, and sees all the different windows that are available. We see different possibilities through different windows, “new vistas”. O’Donohue says, “Complacency, habit and blindness often prevent you from feeling your life. So much depends on the frame of vision – the window through which you look.”

With that line, my attention was truly caught. I have often, with sadness and regret, described the decades of my thirties and most of my forties as a period in which I wasn’t feeling my own life. I was stuck at one window, not able to see new perspectives, only the one landscape I felt trapped within.

O’Donohue goes on to say:

“Deep within every life, no matter how dull or ineffectual it may seem from the outside, there is something eternal happening. This is the secret way that change and possibility conspire with growth…Change, therefore, need not be threatening; it can in fact bring our lives to perfection. Perfection is not cold completion. Neither is it avoidance of risk and danger in order to keep the soul pure or the conscience unclouded. When you are faithful to the risk and ambivalence of growth, you are engaging in your life. The soul loves risk; it is only through the door of risk that growth can enter.”

I sat with one line from that paragraph for long minutes, my warm coffee cradled in my hands. “When you are faithful to the risk and ambivalence of growth, you are engaging in your life.”  At this time in my life, when I make it to the end of an exhausting day only to wonder what, if anything, I have accomplished, I find this thought very energizing. My life is not perfect, but I AM engaging in it. For me, learning to trust my own inner guidance, to make my own choices regardless of (sometimes completely against!) the advice of well-meaning loved ones, is a new window for me. It isn’t easy, and it certainly isn’t perfect. But there is no question, now, of me feeling my own life.

I can look around me at others who are making the choice to engage, as well. A friend who chose one day to move from the window at which he had been standing for years, a window through which he saw only failure and hurt. Choosing new windows, he sees himself accomplishing things he didn’t realize were possible. A colleague who was frustrated and felt used and lied to in her work life, confided in me that she realizes she needs to change her perspective, and that she is actively seeking mentors and role models to help her grow. My dear friends Molly and Kate, who successfully pitched to job-share a position for a women’s leadership nonprofit. None of these individuals have chosen to stay at a window through which they view the world with complacency, habit and blindness. For no one has this choice to be faithful to the risk and ambivalence of growth been easy. There are rough spots aplenty, there are chasms to cross in both our actions and our thinking. But we are doing it – and as a result feeling our lives more deeply than ever before. We are experiencing the stretching, and sometimes the muscle strains, of growth.

In the end, O’Donohue’s version of the open window speaks more deeply to me than Irving’s. However, it is useful to note that both recommend passing the windows – both writers see the danger(s) inherent in stopping too long at any one window. Both authors speak of metaphoric death: of the body and/or of the soul, should we stop moving. Should we stop growing. As a result, I challenge myself – and each of you – to step away from the window of complacency. Check out new windows and perspectives on life. It can be uncomfortable to remain actively in the risk and ambivalence of growth, but it is infinitely better than being stuck.

“I want to cultivate a deep sense of gratitude, of groundedness, of enough, even while I’m longing for something more. The longing and the gratitude, both. I’m practicing believing that God knows more than I know, that he sees what I can’t, that he’s weaving a future I can’t even imagine from where I sit this morning.”
― Shauna Niequist

Over the years, I’ve gotten really good at longing for things. There are things I perennially long for, and things that I fleetingly desire. But if I am honest, there’s always a longing for either more or different.

In some ways, this longing for more or different is what urges me to continue to grow and seek new experiences that enhance my life. It is what prods me into meeting new people, taking risks, into seeing where new adventures will take me.

The down side is that I find it difficult to hold the tension between longing and cultivating, as Shauna Niequist calls it in the quote above, “a deep sense of gratitude, of groundedness, of enough”, which I also deeply wish for.

In order to resolve the tension, for much of my life I just set aside the longing. I felt it in my heart, but I refused to act in ways that moved me toward what I desired. Instead, I took refuge in what I thought I was supposed to do. What I should do to be safe, to be liked, to live a life that looked right from the outside in. All the while, feeling terrible from the inside out.

The other night, I lay in bed thinking about how I’ve changed in the two years since I left my professional life in higher education and took the leap of moving to a new city with no real idea what kind of life awaited me here. I have tried to learn how to follow my instincts, to pay attention to what my heart and my intuition tell me. This isn’t an exact science by any means – there are no guarantees that I will choose rightly, especially after a lifetime of ignoring my intuition. Like all things, I believe I’m getting better at listening to my heart as I practice doing so.

It occurred to me, as I reflected on this, that listening to my heart and distinguishing what I truly long for, as opposed to what the world, what others, what my fears say I should long for is a way of listening for the voice of God whispering in my ear.

And this is why I am working to cultivate the sense of enough in the here and now, even as I long to continue moving forward toward more. Creating the life I desire isn’t only about pushing toward something else, it is also about being present in what I have and taking the time to appreciate it. To be grateful for the gifts of today is not the same as settling for stasis.

But to hear a whisper, one must learn to be still.

Regardless of what the weather brings in the next few weeks, it is clear that spring has arrived in the Twin Cities. While February was brutally cold, we had a fairly mild winter by Minnesota standards – and after the hellish winter of 2013-14, I am incredibly grateful for that. As spring arrives, I feel all of the hopeful emotions that we ascribe to the season: new life, fresh opportunities, and an increase in energy associated with warmer weather and beckoning sunshine.

In the same way spring opens up the possibilities for engagement and activity, it also offers a chance to take stock: we emerge from the dark months of winter, from our warm but confining cocoons and take a look at what winter wrought.

Last summer I wrote a post called “Stop Weighing Yourself“. In it, I wrote about a variety of ways that we literally and figuratively “weigh” ourselves, and in so doing cause self-harm. I’d like to say that this winter I took my own admonitions to heart – and I did in some ways. For one, I literally stopped weighing myself. My bathroom scale became a platform for dust, just another surface that should be wiped off regularly but (mostly) isn’t!

The problem is that I am a person with a life-long eating disorder – when I’m stressed or anxious or upset, I don’t manage my food intake with reason and sanity. My fall-back position is to manage my diet with my emotions. And this winter, my emotions repeatedly told me I needed baked goods (cookies mostly, but also bars, muffins and donuts) to get through the day.  This habit of eating bakery began in the summer, when I was logging over one hundred miles a week on my bike. It was no big deal, just a treat. The arctic cold arrived and my riding came to a dead stop but my daily baked treat habit continued. I couldn’t bring myself to stop when I was stressing about my job or whether my car would start, when I was feeling lonely and isolated from friends. I could tell as winter progressed that there were extra pounds being added to my frame – the way my clothes fit, what I could see looking in the mirror, additional body aches and pains were all clues.

One of the great things I’ve discovered, though, is that gaining a few pounds has not caused me an excess of either panic or shame. In the past, I would have been trash-talking myself nonstop. Now, though, I realize that it is possible to veer off course without seeing that as a sign of personal worthlessness. Not all that long ago, I lost half my body weight – 176 pounds, y’all! – by creating habits that helped me hold myself accountable for making positive choices. I can reinstate those “get on track” habits any time I want or need. So a weekly weigh-in is back in my life, though it won’t be used as a measure of self-worth. Instead, it will simply be one of several tools I use for my success.

In a related development, the past several years I’ve worked very hard in the winter to make certain that I stayed in good physical condition. This has meant remaining active, working out regularly, and finding creative ways to move rather than be sedentary when the snow, ice, and mercury fell. Not this winter. I really struggled to get myself moving. This was due, in part, to working full-time in a job that requires me to be on my aching feet the entire shift. But if I am truthful, it had more to do with feeling overwhelmed by emotions of inadequacy and scarcity as I continued to look for sustaining employment. Rejection is difficult, but repeated and sometimes inexplicable rejection can take a toll on self-confidence and resilience. Both of these qualities were at low ebb for me this winter.

As I have joined my fellow Minneapolitans in celebrating the suddenly warm weather by getting outside and active, it has become clear how much my level of fitness has been impacted by these factors. But one benefit of years of regular physical activity is that my body remembers how good it feels to move. One afternoon of cycling in warm sunshine was enough to activate muscle memory, and to engage my physical desire for more. And when your body feels good, resilience of spirit returns, as well. I’m ready to take on new challenges, including some opportunities that I might not have considered in the past.

Taking stock after the winter, it is clear that there are items to be added to both the “gains” and “losses” columns. While I’ve gained weight, and lost physical condition, I’ve also gained perspective on body issues, and lost the self-shaming. I’ve gained resilience and lost unreasonable barriers I had placed on possibilities for my life. In winter, many things appear to be dormant. But when spring arrives, we discover that growth was silently, secretly taking place below the surface. And with this discovery, we find ourselves ready to spring forward toward new challenges, ready to embrace new growth and successes.

One morning, I put my clothes in a washer at the laundromat and, as has become my habit, left them while I walked around the block to the coffee shop. That particular morning, I was headed back to my laundry, large Americano in hand, when I came upon a group of children waiting for their school bus.

The children stood in mostly silent clusters with their parents. There were one or two quiet conversations between adults and children, but otherwise, everyone stood – eyes forward – waiting. Not too different from most bus-stop behavior I’ve observed here in the city.

What struck me as odd, however, was how wildly different this experience was from my own childhood school-bus-waiting experience. I walked to school with my siblings through most of the early grades, so my first experience with busing to school was in 6th grade when we moved into a housing subdivision in Hastings, Minnesota. I took a bus to school most days from 6th grade through my junior year of high school in Ohio. Not one single day in all those years did I stand silently with adults, eyes forward. Most days, if I wasn’t running to catch the bus at the last second, I was joining in tumultuous, cacophonous, playful engagement with my peers.

One could argue that this difference is partly due to the fact that these children live in the heart of the city. But as I drive to work, through the affluent neighborhoods of Edina, I observe the same scene repeatedly, parents and children waiting together, mostly silent or interacting with one another in their family groups.

I have nothing against children spending more time with their parents than we did back in the Dark Ages when I was a kid. I am concerned, though, about what this says about being a child (or a parent)- namely, that children are only safe when they are with their parents. In at least one incident in Silver Spring, Maryland, parents have been investigated for allowing their children to walk freely through their neighborhood unaccompanied by adults. The mother, quoted in this USA Today article, says, “I grew up in New York City in the 70s and nobody hesitated to let their kids walk around. The only thing that’s changed between then and now is our fear.”

This mother’s statement cuts to the heart of what bothers me about the kids waiting for their bus the other morning. I’m not a parent, but I do understand the fear. Anyone who has ever loved a small child understands the desire to protect that child; anyone who lives in our current cultural climate understands the fear of dark possibilities. But, as Cheryl Strayed says earlier in the passage quoted above, “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves.”

I have to ask: is this the story we want to live in?

I’ve found myself limited by fear time and again. Some of these fears result from the story our culture tells women. That story goes something like this: “Be careful how you dress, where you walk, when you are alone – you are not safe. Bad things can and likely will happen to you. And if you have not met every one of the spoken and unspoken expectations for appropriate behavior, it will be your own fault when the bad thing(s) occur.” There is a narrative like this readily recognizable for whatever group you are part of: gender-, culture-, or role-based.

But I’ve also learned that we don’t have to live in that fear-based world. Many years ago, after my sister first came out to our family, my parents and I attended Iowa City’s gay pride rally with her. We heard a speaker who challenged the audience with this statement, “If you want to live in a world in which you can walk down the street holding your lover’s hand, then walk down the street holding your lover’s hand and you will be living in that world.” As I’ve watched my gay and lesbian friends marrying and creating families together, as I walk through this city and see couples freely expressing their affection, I am amazed to find that we ARE living in that world. Has every person working to create that reality done so safely? Sadly, no. I would argue, though, that even those who have suffered to create this new story would say it has been worth the risks.

So, what exactly am I advocating? Am I saying parents shouldn’t accompany their children to the bus? Of course not. But I am asking us to question the story we are telling ourselves about the world we live in. The story that says we should face each day and each choice from the perspective of fear. The story that says we are at risk of life and limb in every moment. The story that says a fearful response to our world is the only prudent response. When we participate in creating a culture that is fear-based, we also create individual lives that are fear based. And those lives end up being so much smaller than the lives we are capable of living.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!