may
mā
verb
1.
expressing possibility.
2.
expressing permission.

It hit me suddenly, full-force, like a punch to the gut. It’s May already.

My reaction, too, was very much like the reel that happens when you’ve been punched – doubled over, retreating from the fist pushing with such velocity into your midsection. My reactionary thoughts were quick, too, and packed their own punch: its been almost a year, how can you still be so unsettled, why have you been wasting your time, why did you…blah after self-defeating blah.

But that was just an emotional reaction. I don’t know why my default is set to catastrophizing (well, I have suspicions, but let’s not drag them into today’s post). It always has been. Back in the day (almost a year ago), I used to warn the people I supervised: “My first reaction is never my best. Give it a little time, and I’ll have a better one.” And while I haven’t been able to change that about myself, I have picked up some skills to hasten things along.

The first, and most important, is to talk back to that reactionary thug in my head. The second is to move along, as if there’s nothing to see here. Just another first reaction. So when I took that blow to the gut, I told my thoughts to shut the hell up. Then I grabbed my jacket and headed out for a walk.

I was moving pretty quickly as I rounded the corner, as if I could outrun my own thoughts. First stop was for coffee – I wanted the comfort of a cup in my hand. But by the time I reached Washburn-Fair Oaks Park, I was already past the worst of my panic over the swift passage of time. The beautiful evening began to make itself known to my conscious mind. There were families in the park, enjoying the soft spring evening. Some of them had puppies. I defy anyone to sustain a panic attack while watching children play with puppies in a park.

I slowed down and made my way, leisurely, onto Nicollet. I had made a spur-of-the-moment decision to get take out from one of the restaurants on Eat Street, so I stopped three people who had obviously just picked something up and asked what they had. One had Thai, one Chinese, and the last actually had leftovers cleverly disguised as take out. The Asian-influenced culinary choices helped me decide – I went to the Mexican place whose name I can never remember.

I ordered two tacos, hard shells, and a side of beans. When my order was ready, I headed out the door, but stopped to rearrange the items in my sack. That’s when I discovered that my order came with a side of chips and salsa. I took one chip, savoring it’s salty, earthy corn flavor. It was so delicious! I stopped the next pedestrian coming toward me on the sidewalk and offered him the bag of chips and salsa. From his reaction, it was a good impulse.

And just like that, my second – better – reaction arrived. I began to think about the word “may”, and it’s multiple meanings. Suddenly, I remembered riding in a group bike ride on Saturday night when the bike mechanic-cum-poet riding beside me said, “I always love this time of year. Everything seems full of possibility.” One meaning of may – expressing possibility.

What if, I wondered, I gave myself permission to stop worrying about everything and just continue exploring the possibilitties that present themselves? Another meaning of may – expressing permission.

Possibility and permission. If nothing else, this year has been teaching me to dwell within these two concepts. To look beyond fear and find the possibility inherent in each day’s activities. To give myself permission to explore, to try on, to fail. To hold myself in this place for as long as is necessary without giving up or giving in to defeatism.

At that moment (and I’m not making this up) the sun broke through some lingering clouds for a truly spectacular sunset. I stopped thinking so much, and just let myself feel May wash over me.

“Yes, Yes”, Zachariah Schaap’s Flipagram

Note: If you haven’t already watched this on my FB page, I LOVE this flipagram from Saturday’s ride. Even though I am only in it very briefly, I look joyfully in the moment – as do all of my ride companions. It completely captures what it’s like to give yourself permission to be open to possibilities in the moment!

Always tell the Truth. That way, you don’t have to remember what you said.
~ Mark Twain

I guess I’ll just blurt this out: I haven’t always been a stickler for the truth.

In fact, during my formative years, my parents grew weary of me stonewalling where the truth was concerned. Once, I was sent outside to get firewood from the pile against the back wall of our house, underneath the picture window in the family room. There had been wet weather, followed by plummeting temperatures, which caused ice to form like a layer of cement between the neatly stacked rows. I grabbed a piece of wood and it wouldn’t budge, so I applied brute force. The log broke free from its ice casing and flew upward – directly into the plate glass of the huge window, cracking it straight up the middle. After brief consideration of my course of action, I quickly gathered the rest of the firewood and took it inside. I didn’t mention the broken window to anyone as I nonchalantly proceeded through the day.

At dinner that night, my dad said, “Your mother and I would like to know who broke the window in the family room.”  I looked around the table at the innocent faces of my siblings and surprised myself by fessing-up. My folks were so astonished that I had stepped forward they were speechless. I didn’t even get in trouble for the costly damage. Years later my parents told me that they knew it had been me, but had never anticipated that I would own up to it: they always gave me the opportunity to come clean but I so rarely chose any road but the one to perdition.

In graduate school, I worked as an intern in a research and service project in which we provided values-based career counseling to academically gifted students in exchange for their participation in our research. Each student took several instruments – a personality test, a vocational preference assessment, and a values inventory. The values inventory (a version of the Rokeach Value Survey) asks takers to rank order values according to the importance of that value to them. The interns who provided the counseling interventions and interpreted survey results to the student participants took the instruments and engaged in the counseling session activities during our training. Many of my graduate cohort selected “honesty” as one of their highest values. (This was also true of professional colleagues later in my career.) I never understood this. Not once did honesty crack my top five.

In group discussions about the values we selected, I often found myself stating that “The truth is overrated.” I had numerous arguments to shore up my position. I believed, I said, that truth was malleable and an absolute reliance on it was detrimental to one’s overall smooth functioning in life. I can’t even remember all of the examples and justifications I used – they were many and I was eloquent in explaining my position.

As I matured (remember I was a late bloomer), I began to believe my own hype about truth less and less. When I noticed some inner discomfort with my old stand, I decided that I had been confusing the concepts of truth and honesty. I decided that truth was not always convenient, therefore could be set aside in unimportant situations. Honesty, on the other hand, was linked somehow to character and integrity. As such, Honesty should be observed, in spirit at least, at all times.

Yes, I am capable of the mental gymnastics to have accepted that I could tell an untruth (a lie) while in service to the greater value of honesty. However, it is instructive to note that at the time I engaged in these mental gymnastics, I was living a very constricted life – one in which I was emotionally isolated in spite of being surrounded by people constantly through my work in higher education. I was ballooning up in weight – until I reached a high somewhere above 350 pounds. I felt insecure, fearful, and lonely.

Something was seriously wrong with my whole perspective on truth and honesty. Eventually, I came to see this. One of my great “AHA” moments in life came when I realized that my vigorous defense of lying was a way of supporting my decision to continue lying to myself. And the whole argument that I could be honest without being truthful was simply a rationalization to allow me to feel like I hadn’t completely given up on the concept of integrity. The truth was that I lied to protect myself – in exactly the same way that I gained weight to erect a self-protective barrier to keep from being hurt. The two were inextricably bound with one another, entwined coping mechanisms. When I began to address one, I was forced to take a hard look at the other.

A few things I’ve learned on this journey to be more truthful with myself and, therefore, to create a more honest presence in my life and the world:

• “Some people will not tolerate such emotional honesty in communication. They would rather defend their dishonesty on the grounds that it might hurt others. Therefore, having rationalized their phoniness into nobility, they settle for superficial relationships.” ~ unknown author

When we fear emotional honesty, we choose isolation. I once thought that people must not pay close attention to me because they didn’t “get” me. When I started being honest with myself, I realized that people didn’t get “the real me” because I never shared her. I was virtually always posing as a person I thought others might like. Getting beyond the superficial requires dropping the pose.

• “We tell lies when we are afraid….afraid of what we don’t know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.” ~ Tad Williams

The fear grows stronger because we have added the fear of being “found out” in our dishonesty. It grows stronger because we have fed it. And it grows stronger because we have further removed ourselves from right relationship – with others and with ourselves. Being that far removed from human connection is a very frightening place to be.

• “Our lives improve only when we take chances- and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.” – Walter Anderson 

I originally set out to lose some weight. That’s all, just improve my health and get in better shape. I quickly realized, however, that for me that task would be impossible without getting real with myself – without telling myself the truth about what I ate, how much, and why. I’m not sure I would have set out on that journey if I had realized how it would affect every aspect of my life, every thing that I thought I believed. Because once you begin telling the truth in one area of your life, it has a cascading effect. You find you need to do so in other areas. The risk is real, because choosing to be truthful with yourself will lead to change.

All that said, you’re probably wondering whether I always tell the truth now. I can honestly say that I try to. This new life I’m working to establish offers me daily opportunities to assess the veracity of what I tell myself – about who I am, about what I want, about how I relate with others in my new community. I don’t have to share it all with everyone, but I do have to take some time daily to reflect on how honest I’m being with myself.

Integrity is telling myself the Truth. Andy Honesty is telling the Truth to other people. – Spencer Johnson

“It became clear that the anticipated battle would take place on Sunday, July 21, 1861. Stories would often be told about how spectators from Washington, riding in carriages and bringing along picnic baskets, had raced down to the area so they could watch the battle as if it was a sporting event…And by late afternoon the Union Army was in retreat. The road back to Washington became a scene of panic, as the frightened civilians who had come out to watch the battle tried to race homeward alongside thousands of demoralized Union troops.”  (Battle of Bull Run in Summer of 1861 Was a Disaster for the Union Army, Robert McNamara)

I remember hearing this story in a history lesson sometime in my youth and wondering, even at my tender age, “What were they thinking?!” In all honesty, though, I’ve remembered this story primarily at moments in my adult life when I find myself in frightening situations that I am in only through my own volition.

An example may be helpful to illustrate. One mild midnight, everyone trooped out of a friend’s New Year’s Eve party to stand on the deck of her neighbor’s pool while he set off a celebratory fireworks display. The pyrotechnician/arsonist for the evening was highly intoxicated, which should have been a red flag. In fact, my friend’s husband (a former firefighter) refused to join the group and this, too, was a warning that went largely unheeded. When the first volley of rockets was lit, they all came zooming straight at the spectators standing where we had been told we would be “safe.” I imagined the headline: “12 Revelers Hospitalized: Too Idiotic to Avoid Drunken Fireworks Display”.

I could give many more examples. But the point is that we all sometimes walk blithely into situations that, given a little time and forethought, we might otherwise avoid. So while I occasionally think of these events and rue my naiveté, I don’t beat myself up over them. Instead, I try to learn from them for the next time. Just as I’m fairly certain no one who rushed out with a picnic basket to watch the first Battle of Bull Run made that same mistake at the second Battle of Bull run, I am pretty sure I will listen to my gut telling me to distrust drunk men with matches and incendiary devices.

Usually, I’ve thought of the Bull Run revelers from the perspective of advanced reasoning skills – and whether or not these unknowns from the past employed them. I can totally see how it happened, though: everyone had been talking excitedly about the impending war for weeks; the rumor was that one battle would determine the war – and as luck would have it, that battle was going to take place in their backyard! They grabbed their friends, some food and beverages, and headed out to see history in the making. How cool is that?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about those picnickers from a different angle. I’ve been empathizing with the fact that they found themselves in a frightening predicament. Admittedly, they got themselves into the mess. Still, I imagine their bewilderment as the day went from anticipation to terrified retreat. I imagine them thinking, “How did this happen?” or “How could I have been so stupid?” or, for the high-feeling types just “Aaaarrrrggggggghhhhh!!!!!!”

This time last year, I was pondering a significant outing in my own life. I worked with a coach, I talked about my options with friends and family, and I carefully combed through my own inner desires. I worked with a financial consultant and parsed my choices. All of the work, the research, the endless discussions came down to this – I either packed my basket and went off to the battle or I stayed where I was. The battle was where great things might happen, where history might be made. Staying put was where, in the immortal words of Barry Manilow, it was “all very nice, but not very good.” Despite the forethought I gave this life change, I had no way to predict the course of the future. For this very reason, my empathy for the picnickers at Bull Run has increased – while they might, admittedly, have seen the downside to their plan, even they could not have known the future ahead of time.

In fact, upon reflection, it turns out that spectating at the Battle of Bull Run and taking a leap of faith into our own possible futures have a lot in common.

• No matter what we’re packing for our journeys, we can’t predict what we will actually need. Did the Bull Run picnickers pack weaponry and ammunition with their sandwiches and lemonade? Lord knows, they likely needed things they hadn’t brought with them. We’ve all been there. You open your basket, or suitcase, or toolbox, and what you need is conspicuously absent. There is no point in crying about it, you have to just let it go and move one with what you DO have.

“Incremental growth is walking down familiar paths carrying the same assumptions. But, the first – real step – toward exponential growth is a profound and dreadful letting go.” Or so says Dan Rockwell, the Leadership Freak. (http://leadershipfreak.wordpress.com/about/) He goes on to say you must let go of one rope while reaching for the next – which means there is a moment in time when you are not actually holding on. Nothing you’ve packed prepares you for the disorientation of that “moment”, the length of which varies from literal moments to months or longer. Rockwell goes on to reassure us that “change happens quickly on the inside, even though it took a long time to get there. But, change on the outside continues to be painfully slow.” This is a reassuring message when you aren’t certain you’re holding onto anything that can support your weight – something is happening even if you can’t yet see it. (For more of Dan’s insights on radical growth, read this blog entry http://leadershipfreak.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/8-growth-principles-that-transform-leadership/)

• Keep the faith, but also take the action. If you ever find yourself in the midst of a pitched battle, pray for guidance and assistance. Then, ditch the picnic basket and run! Cowering is a human reaction. Allow your humanity its experience of panic. But don’t stand still and wallow. I expected change in my own life to be hard. I am, by nature, risk-averse and here I was, taking a huge risk (quitting my job, relocating, starting over). What I didn’t expect was for it to be this hard – reality-hard, as opposed to thinking-ahead-hard. This horrible winter encouraged my natural reaction to hunker down and wait it out. The more I ducked-and-covered, the higher my anxiety climbed. What I have discovered is that any action with forward momentum, no matter how small, results in a lessening of the  fear.

• We’re all on the road to hell… So you didn’t intend to get caught in the middle of a pitched battle between two armies? Too bad, because that’s where you are now. What we intend and what actually happens don’t always match up. When this occurs, life doesn’t stop and wait for us to catch up with it or to get with the program – it inexorably marches forward. For example, I’ve had to intentionally tell myself that I can’t keep putting things off while I am “in transition”. I may not feel or even be settled, but my life IS this moment, not what happens down the line. If you’re not where you intend(ed) to be, work to change that. Just don’t forget that tomorrow is never guaranteed. Today is your real life, inhabit it!

• Adrenaline might help you run faster, but it wreaks havoc on your health over the long haul. If you are in physical danger, by all means keep running! Your flight response is intended to keep you alive, to help you survive. But when the danger is fear of the future, it is probably time to take steps to let the adrenaline dissipate. There is a pandemic of anxiety in our society these days. One way to counter it is to make yourself stop running. Slow down, breathe, pray or meditate. Recently, I felt my own panic and anxiety rising daily to the point where it seemed to sit on my solar plexus like a huge granite boulder – immovable. One night it became unbearable; I laid in bed struggling to breathe around its weight. That’s when I discovered a secret: I could just give it away.

I said out loud, “God, I’m giving this to you. Its yours. Both this boulder of anxiety and the future I’ve been so panicked about. I’m trusting that you’ve got this.” I felt immediate relief in that moment. I strongly recommend letting God/the Universe/your Higher Power take this burden.  When the anxiety threatens, remind yourself that the future isn’t your problem or concern. Put the faith back in the phrase “leap of faith”.

We will all find ourselves at points in our lives asking, “What did I just do?” or “How stupid can I get?” These questions may occur at the surface (such as in the case of the New Year’s eve fireworks) or at the deep, interior level of growth and change. Like me, you may find yourself wondering, while feeling vulnerable and exposed, “Did I just show up for a battle with nothing but a picnic basket?” Our best response is to be open to the possibilities for exponential growth this may provide. Will it be frightening, difficult, and/or life altering? You bet. Will it also be worth the pain and self-doubt? Martha Beck, life coach and self-help guru says, “You’ll find that the more annoying or even devastating an adventure is to live, the better wayfinding tale it makes.”  Let’s take that as a “Yes”.

Let’s get this out on the table right away: I don’t really care what anyone else thinks about this. I definitely don’t care what conflicting medical studies show. And I don’t really even care if what I am about to tell you is factually true. That’s how one-sided I am when it comes to my life with coffee.

When I was a kid, my grandpa Postel lived in an apartment in the basement of our house. Occasionally, I got to stay overnight in the apartment with him. (There were six of us kids, so by the time he cycled through the bunch, it was a rare and special event). After spending the night, we’d get up early and go to 6:00 a.m. mass at the Cathedral, followed by breakfast at Rings Restaurant on Dodge Street. On these special mornings, I was given the choice: a cup of tea or one of coffee, loaded with sugar and creamer. I always chose tea. To this day, I regret my childish mistake.

My parents lived on coffee (reference the 6 children mentioned above). My mother didn’t leave her bedroom in the mornings until she’d had her first two cups, delivered by my father or one of us kids if a proxy was needed. Depending on the day, there might be a pot at lunch, but there was WITHOUT FAIL coffee at supper. I learned how to use an electric percolator at an early age.

By the time I was in high school, I was regularly helping myself to my parents’ stash. Of course, I poured in the sugar and milk, but there was no mistaking that dark, earthy coffee flavor. Then, in 1976 a coffee shortage happened, and prices skyrocketed. In an effort to curb their children’s burgeoning taste for the liquid gold, my parents instituted a “drink it black or not at all” rule in the house. They said that if we didn’t like the way it tasted on its own, we didn’t like it enough to justify the expense of drinking it. Unfortunately, their Machiavellian plot backfired, because 1976 marks the year I fell truly, madly, deeply in love with the bean.

Throughout my college years, I was an aficionado of the greasy spoon coffee: Saturday mornings at a breakfast cafe where a waitress named Patty kept it hot and filled to the brim; late nights at Perkins, where my friend Marty would wave the empty pot over his head to signal our server that we’d reached the bottom of yet another “bottomless cup”. By the mid-80s, I was in grad school and the modern coffee trend finally reached the midwest. Coffee shops with flavored coffees, brew bars, and coffee drinks proliferated. (Unbelievably, it took almost another twenty years for Big Coffee to claim any real estate in Iowa.) I officially became a coffee snob.

Regardless of the ambience or delivery method, I remained true to my coffee purist roots. I drank it black and strong, first thing in the morning and all day long. Occasionally, I ordered a cappuccino to experience the sublime flavor of coffee sipped through expertly foamed milk. (Eventually, a trip to Ireland changed my coffee habit irrevocably – the first time I drank coffee with real Irish cream. Now my Americano is almost always softened with half-and-half.) I often drank copious cupfuls of the stuff at night, then went to bed and fell peacefully asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

I realize that everything I’ve shared thus far serves as an argument for addiction. I can’t deny that. About ten years ago, I was suffering from horrible heartburn and acid reflux. I gave up soda and coffee, cold-turkeyed them both. I felt horrible for several days as I suffered with the telltale splitting headache of caffeine withdrawal.

And here’s where the love affair side of things kicks in. After successfully removing coffee from my life for almost a year, I felt physically fine but found myself still longing for a cup, for the taste of it in my mouth: I missed my cup of joe. More important, I missed the ME who indulged in those cups. So I started up again – and, like a miracle, discovered that coffee was not the cause of my previous discomfort. I still only rarely indulge in sodas, but I quickly returned to drinking coffee daily.

Why did I miss coffee so much? I missed the ritual of having a “first thing in the day”. I missed holding the warm cup in my hand. I missed the warmth of familiarity coffee offers in cold new surroundings, and I definitely missed the purposefulness of “going for coffee” as opposed to wandering about town aimlessly. Most important, it wasn’t until I gave up coffee that I discovered just how much a part of my social engagement with family and friends it was. When I visit my parents, morning coffee is my favorite part of the day – we read the paper or watch the morning news and talk in an unguarded way that is never really replicated at other times of the day. With my siblings (one brother actually owns a coffee shop) and friends, long, rambling, silly or serious discussions are had while hanging out over coffee. Or, like when I visit my brother Matt in Chicago, we get up and out to walk over to Cafe Mustache and engage with the neighborhood – something I’ve happily replicated in my new neighborhood by heading over to the Boiler Room. When I am alone, as I am so often since moving here, coffee shops are always welcoming, and good coffee fuels my ability to relax then focus on projects.

I’d like to mention that I have dear friends and family members who DON’T drink the stuff. Even some who cannot understand in any way its appeal. We have awesome times together, too, though they’ve accepted that I might bring coffee with me to their homes (and drink it while they share a bottle of wine). My friend, Sue, even keeps an elegant electric percolator in the cupboard – and coffee in the freezer – just to make me feel at home when I visit.

Can I live without coffee? I know the answer is yes. Would I want to? Not really.

So, you may be wondering, why am I sharing this long reminiscence about the role of coffee in my life and personal history? Well, I wanted you to understand my relationship with coffee, my love of it, before I share part two next week – my adventures in working at a coffee shop. Stay tuned!