Category Archives: Inspiration

Questions for Connection

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What excellent question have you asked or been asked lately? How did it affect your relationship with the person asked/asking?

Ever since I started working with my life coach in 2005, I have practiced asking more and better questions in any encounter, in all life domains. The returns on this investment of presence and curiosity–idea generation, heightened conversation, and deepening connection, among others–far outweigh the costs of occasional awkward pauses and uncomfortable deflection.

I wonder, however, if I give enough time or energy to answering the interesting quesitons I ask?

Why, for instance, do I behave so differently with people in and out of my family? I feel like the same person in both contexts, and everybody knows the same me; yet I know I show up not the same at home as outside. Fascinating.

Today was Day 190 of my morning pages practice. Looking back, much of the journaling consists of lists, plans, recollections, and reflections. The same questions arise recurrently, mostly centered around behavior and relationships, and I attempt to answer overtly about half the time. Also fascinating! I feel comfortable with this state of things, as the simple act of writing them down and letting them sit on and below my consciousness day to day allows me to consider them slowly. Persistent questions point me to my core values, purpose, and goals. I feel no rush to formally answer these existential, identity-related, philosophical inquiries. I tell the story that simply marking their re/o-ccurrence pins them to some level of awareness where I can return regularly, like periodically adding brushstrokes to paintings that live in various rooms of my mind, heart, and life, when I happen to walk by. These rooms are bright and airy, each equipped with a sturdy easel, thick canvas, rich color palette, and full set of implements to create and revise, ad lib. I feel calm and focused, reassured that whatever is happening on any given day, I have time and energy set aside to process and digest, coming to clarity organically and as needed, all in good time. My morning pages facilitate insights and understanding regularly, and I see this practice sticking for the foreseeable future.

What I really relish, however, is engaging in questions, exploration, and discussion with other people! I wonder if this is how I make friends, actually? It does not matter if I just met you or I’ve known you my whole life; if you’re willing to dive with me like humanities nerds in a submersible to plumb the depths of open and honest questions and wild ideas of possibility–about anything from language to muscle physiology, human nature to politics, phylogeny to music–I might soon profess my undying love for you and chase you for more of that energizing connection. It is most often with friends, in those small, relaxed, meandering, sometimes calorie-laden gatherings, where nascent and novel answers to delightful questions so beautifully emerge and bloom. I carry my journal everywhere, to capture these pearls when they drop, as though gifts from the gods of sentience and relationship.

People crave deeper connection desperately now, in our increasingly chaotic, impersonal, and globalized world. I see references to the 2015 New York Times article “36 Questions That Lead to Love” regularly (that’s probably the algorithm, right?). If you cannot access it, see the original research article by Arthur Aron et al, “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings” with the questions listed at the end. Organized into three sets of increasing intimacy, the exercise invites us to ask our conversation partners questions such as, “What would constitute a perfect day for you?” “What is your most treasured memory?” and, “Complete this sentence: ‘I wish I had someone with whom I could share …'” From NYT: “The idea is that mutual vulnerability fosters closeness. To quote the study’s authors, ‘One key pattern associated with the development of a close relationship among peers is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.’ Allowing oneself to be vulnerable with another person can be exceedingly difficult, so this exercise forces the issue.” I have the article bookmarked on my phone, and have yet to invite anyone to answer with me–maybe I’ll set an intention to do so on my upcoming friend dates? Part of me thinks I’m doing fine connecting on my own, and you never know, this could be truly next level.

Renowned psychologist Esther Perel created a similar game in 2021, Where Should We Begin, now in its 2nd edition. This query is how she historically initiates therapy sessions with clients. Questions in the game include, “I can’t believe I got away with…” “My latest crush is…” and, “My favorite love story to tell…” The box includes questions that range from lighthearted to serious, to sexual and beyond, which positively tickles me–because it’s all just life. In this age of polarization and easy mutual disdain and disconnection, games like this can help us all recognize our shared humanity.

I have purchased yet a different box of questions for connection, How Deep Will You Go? Its creators describe it as “a game of deep conversation without worrying what to ask, to feel closer in a way you never felt before.” Three levels of questions are labeled Ice Breakers (“What motivates you in life?”), Confessions (“Why have you kept going?”), and Getting Deep (“What is something you don’t tell most people?”). Reading the cards, I imagine with whom I’d want to delve. It depends on the question(s), of course, and also context and mood. I can picture a small friend group setting for the playful ones, and core belief/value ones as actual ice breakers for purposeful group work, such as a Braver Angels workshop. For the more intimate questions, though, I picture a one on one meeting, with plenty of preface and mutual agreement to actively engage in deepening personal connection.

Of course, interpersonal closeness is an iterative process: Other than the most superficial queries, the willingness to ‘go deeper’ requires some level of established trust and safety. That can take a while, depending on a multitude of factors. But once that foundational rapport is achieved, subsequent connection facilitated by these questions, one by one, may unfurl like the slow and steady inflation of a hot air balloon from the ground, lifting us gently together to affinity and affection we could never achieve where we started.

Connection decks like Where Should We Begin and How Deep Will You Go? make me so optimistic. I have loved and tried to ask questions like this for years, and now I feel validated. What if we all opened up to one another just a little bit more, just a little more often? What if we held one another’s hopes, joys, struggles, regrets, dreams, and confidences with a little more respect and reverence? What if we approached one another, friends and strangers alike, with the assumption of caring and mutual well wishes, looking to hold one another up, rather than with suspicion and wariness? And what if we rewarded such unearned generosity of spirit with reciprocal kindness?

The practice of mindfully asking deeper, more personal, loving, and intimate questions could go a long way to bridging our seemingly insurmountable differences; we all need this right now. It’s not appropriate in every encounter, of course. We must attune to context and opportunity, and act (ask) with confidence and humility. And that’s also the point, isn’t it?

The more present we are to one another’s vibrations, our moods and energies, the more likely we are to connect in earnest, regardless of what questions we choose to ask or not.

Understanding, validation, belonging, closeness, intimacy–we humans thrive when we feel these often and deeply. I still have hope that we can do it better.


The Jar of Smiles

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Who doesn’t need a tiny love note once in a while?

The ‘jar of smiles’ idea came across my Instagram feed some months ago and, though it’s not new, this time it moved me instantly. I could buy a jar of notes online, or I could simply write my own! I have stacks of origami paper left over from past obsessions with the kids–perfect. And since I also save glass jars like a true hoarder, I was all set.

The first two jars went to friends going through hardships. I think of these amazing sisters often and try to text them in real time, and this is another way for them to feel loved by me, but at moments of their own choosing.

Daughter suggested I write a jar for my friends at Ethos, my beloved gym–brilliant! After moving to a beautiful new space 2.5 times bigger than the original and expanding team and services with ambition and gusto, I knew the transition–for all of us–would be a challenge. And it was daunting to consider writing enough smile notes for a whole community. When the gym re-opened last month, the elevated energy was palpable. Every fear or worry I had about the culture not translating was allayed immediately. People’s auras and vibrations pulsed with excitement, light, and possibility. I would not have imagined that the love shared among my gym friends could get better, and here we are–the commute can take up to twice as long now, and I drive it happily just to bask in the light and connection while I train my body. So of course I could pour all that love into a Jar of Smiles!

Turns out, well wishes are easy and fun to write. While listening one night to Beastly Beauty by Jennifer Donnelly (another book I highly recommend; check out my review on Goodreads), the inspiration flowed. Any word from any given passage that crossed my consciousness could evoke something positive. Most messages apply to myself also–reminders of how I want to approach any day or challenge. Music lyrics, books, conversations, memories, items on my desk–once I’m in the love note mindset, each smile message emerges spontaneously and practically writes itself, alternating between affirmations, admonishments for self-compassion and self-care, interesting questions, and cheerleading.

What I had not expected was how uplifted I would feel myself after writing them. Each note is an original thought, occurring to me in real time and sometimes morphing as it emerges, as I run out of space in a line or leave out a letter. But the sentiment and intention remain steadfast–to connect, even anonymously–because we are all human, we are all here doing our best, and our core needs for feeling seen, heard, understood, accepted, and loved are the same. It reminds me of when I write my patients’ action plans at the end of their full day physicals, after consulting with me, the dietician, and the exercise physiologist. The team and I have the luxury of long interviews, when we have time to ask deeper questions and really know people. Our annual health summary acknowledges people’s persistent self-care efforts and serves as pep talk for the year to come. I see you. This is what you mean to your colleagues and loved ones. This is what I wish for you.

My smile jar messages feel like little love darts–the Nerf suction cup kind–shot joyfully at my friends, aiming to bestow mini hickies of encouragement. Maybe a small note will lift someone and make them more likely to lift someone else, because we are always more likely to shine on others when we feel light ourselves. If the effect only lasts a moment, even one subsequent interaction, that’s enough! It’s like dropping grains of sand on a dune (an analogy my mentor taught me), one at a time. Most land uneventfully–the receipient gets a transient oxytocin hit that passes. Once in a while a few grains cause a small slide along the dune face–people start to hold doors for one another, let others into traffic, say hello and start friendly conversations in the check-out line. And over time, with enough grains steadily deposited, ridges and knolls change shape–we start assuming the best instead of the worst in each other, get curious before applying judgment, and seek connection more than division.

Love notes have the power to transform.

I have a 4-inch stack of 3-inch origami squares, a set of rainbow pens, and a box full of glass jars at the ready. I have a list of recipients and occasions, and of course a set of refill smiles for the jar at Ethos. I hope people keep plucking the little squares out regularly, and I hope they do get a good, real smile from each. They are written with love, and I smile myself, rereading as I fold them. It’s meditative and uplifting, and that is my wish for anyone who opens one.

Onward in love and light, my friends. Please share yours, no matter how small–love given away multiplies rather than diminishes–the world needs every grain and every message of love we can muster right now.

Dark Matter: On Choices and Possibilities

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Please note: Spoilers ahead!
—– —– —– —– —– —–

“Are you happy with your life?”

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious. 
 


Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.

Before a man Jason’s never met smiles down at him and says, “Welcome back, my friend.”  
 


In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.


Thus goes the introduction on Blake Crouch’s website to Dark Matter, one of my new favorite books of 2024. I had heard of neither book nor author before Book Club chose this title, and now I will explore more! I don’t generally gravitate toward science fiction, though Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir is also one of my favorites… Maybe I will reconsider my preferences? Regardless, Dark Matter is so much more than just science fiction, which is why I love it!

The essential premise: Jason, the protagonist, made the seminal choice at age 27 to be with Daniella, with whom he had an unplanned pregnancy. For fifteen years now they have been married and raised their son Charlie. Jason teaches physics at a local college and Daniella teaches art. They have an ordinary life. In a different universe, the one where he chose his career over Daniella, he creates the impossible device that allows him to travel between universes. This version of him, “Jason2,” infiltrates Protagonist Jason’s world, switches places, and takes over his life with Daniella and Charlie. Protagonist Jason spends the rest of the novel trying desparately to get his life back, even though he had never really thought of it as something he would choose, over and over again, to sacrifice everything to save. How many of us would see our lives this way, as the life we would fight to the death for? What would it take for us to think/feel like this? This is the kind of question that the book evokes for me, and I could not be more intrigued.

Acceptance

I found myself wishing Jason had realized and accepted sooner that he was thrown into a concurrent, alternate reality–of his own creation. Maybe this is just because it was so obvious to the reader/listener? I marveled at how easily I myself accepted the premise, and how apparently little empathy I had for his initial grief and disbelief. Yikes. I just wanted him to move on from denial and start solving the problem. But we humans all require time and space to come to terms with severe emotional and cognitive trauma, right? Monitoring my own emotions while listening reminds me to be more patient and take others’ perspectives more often. That is the value of fiction, I am still learning.

Imagine the set of any and all possible life paths, both behind and in front of you, based on any decision, occurrence, or circumstance you have ever been in, from before you were born. It is literally infinite and unfathomable. The drawing below would be basically a solid block of black with a thin meandering green line on the left, and a solid block of green to the right, too many paths to differentiate visually. Every path could intersect with every other at any possible fork and convergence, because every unit of time has an infinite set of possible concurrent events to create any given reality. I find this idea easy to accept–exciting, even–though I can’t quite wrap my head around the actual scale of infinite possibility. I don’t feel a need, though; just the idea that it’s simply bigger than I can possibly imagine is enough; I can shrug, move on, and live whatever is in my present moment, but with this fascinating awareness that anything could turn out any way, based on any miniscule change at any time, in anything! Wow!

from Tim Urban @waitbutwhy

Assumptions

Jason experiences the multiverse nexus as a corridor with an infinite length and infinite number of doors. Each door leads to one alternate universe in real time. Soon after realizing that Jason faces literally innumerable alternate lives to attempt re-entering, not knowing whether any will be the one life he actually lived and which Jason2 has usurped, I felt both a little despondent and moderately excited. Mostly I just prepared myself for a colossally dystopian ending. But I also wondered how he (or I, in his shoes), would handle this reality. That extreme uncertainty, coupled with a visceral drive to attain what we most want, most need, live for–how would that manifest in our thoughts and actions in any given situation? How would our assumptions until that point be rendered utterly irrelevant, and how would we respond? How could we possibly know or decide what assumptions to make going forward?

I assumed the doors were all arranged randomly–that Jason had no control whatsoever of what he walked into over any given threshold–hence my utter pessimism that he could ever find his way back to his one lived life. I assumed total victimhood for the protagonist in this eleven hour audiobook. But of course that was not the case–that wouldn’t be a very engaging novel, would it? So if we live any aspect of our lives this way in the real world, how engaging is that?

Agency

Midway through the novel, Jason learns that he can, after all, exert some control over which life lies behind the door he opens, and he finally lands in his own universe. A whole new set of mind bending challenges and plot twists ensues, repeatedly forcing him to alter what flimsy, seat-of-the-pants plan he may have concocted in the last five minutes. But the shift in mindset from powerless to powerful is palpable and forceful. I could feel the expanding energy and mass of hope, by way of agency, on Jason’s behalf; my inner cheerleader got even more animated, if that’s possible.

How can we access our own agency more/better? How often do we conduct our lives in a default state of victimhood, inadvertently assuming we have little or no power? I think of systems here–rules, regulations, protocols and ‘the way we’ve always done it’. I also think of relationships–boundaries separating the professional from the personal, organizational hierarchies–basically, limiting conventions and social norms of any and all kinds. What could happen, how could we make things better, if we just asked a little more often, “What can I do here?” This question elicits at least five different sets of answers, just by putting the emphasis on a different word. “What can I do here?” is a different question from “What can I do here,” “What can I do here,” etc.

I’m not saying we should all carelessly flout the status quo everywhere we go. Whether we accept, acquiesce, nudge, challenge, revolt, or exit, recognizing that we choose to do so is the key–because most of the time, it is a choice. We may feel obligated, forced, and powerless by finances, commitments, social norms and other things. But the conscious recognition of our own free will, no matter how small it feels, grounds us in agency, and thus in our power. We can choose to ignore, question, invite, invent, and create. Every decision carries risks, costs, and benefits; it is up to us to determine our goals, discern what trade-offs we are and are not willing to make to achieve them, and then act.

Appreciation

Am I happy with my life? HELL. YES. I marvel every day at my good fortune; every weekend when I sit down to write this blog, I feel that ‘pinch me’ giddiness that I get to do it. And when I’m in the mountains, forget it, the euphoria defies expression.

This book made me realize my appreciation of my life more intellectually. I say that I ‘hate’ living in Chicago, mostly because I felt obligated to choose it over moving back to Colorado. I wish and plan to move back one day, and have made a life now wherein I already go back often, which probably makes me appreciate it that much more, right? I wonder sometimes how life could have turned out if I tried harder to go back–or if I had made any one of a multitude of different choices in my past. But those thoughts never last long. I know life would have been different, and not necessarily better or worse. And it’s not all up to me–much of life happens to, around, and with me, not by me. So this whole ‘my life is a choice’ thing is simultaneously absolutely true and also not at all–another magnificent paradox!

Once again I come to rest–physically, psychologically, and relationally–on mindfulness. This practice of being with things the way they are, including how I feel about them, without judgment or resistance, is absolutely the most liberating mindset I have found yet. The stronger my practice, the more peaceful I feel, and then the more easily I can discern and identify where my agency, and thus my power, lie. How awesome that a science fiction book about violating the multiverse can deepen this insight!

The Dark Side

Do you believe that we all have the capacity for both unlimited greatness and bottomless corruption? I do. Maybe not all of us for both/all extremes, but I do think that under duress or in extraordinary circumstances, we all have the capacity to do things we would never imagine or expect. Crouch suggests this toward the end of Dark Matter, when multiple versions of Jason emerge, each having traversed his own uniquely traumatizing journey through the multiverse in search of home, all with the singular goal of getting his life back, and each with varying degrees of compunction for acts of violence, including murder, to achieve that end.

While I cannot prove or disprove what capacities for greatness or corruption each of us harbors, I believe that holding open the possibility makes me more empathetic and compassionate toward others when I see them behaving in destructive ways. I often see the meme that says people are fighting battles we know nothing about, admonishing us to be kind. In my observation, we too often respond to one another with judgment long and far before kindness. Our culture punishes transgression without compassion or rehabilitation, perpetuating trauma, isolation, and cyclic patterns of pain begetting pain. ‘Greatness’, however we define it, can also come with severe costs, including sometimes our better judgment and character–as exemplified by Jason2.

Infinite Possibilities

I wrote about this idea two years ago, on my 49th birthday, having listened to The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, another book that eloquently explores choices, regrets, acceptance, and peace. There must be a multitude of stories on this concept constellation, each a unique, instructive knot on humanity’s strong floss thread of resilience, creativity, perspective, and connection. I still hold my Book of Regrets, but it feels less heavy today. Self-compassion practice gives it wheels, so I may roll with it rather than carry it like a yoke. I’m grateful to Book Club for leading me to Dark Matter, a cosmic opportunity to revisit multiple existential questions at once, to explore for myself and among friends what really matters, how I want to be, what I choose to attend to and do.

I’m currently listening to The Code of Us by Liv Evans, performed by Jodie Harris and Steve West. I already know I’ll want to write about it; I’m prepared for my heart to be broken and my mind to be bent, reshaped, and expanded. I look forward to deepening of my sense of connection to humanity, and to stimulating further my consideration of artificial intelligence and the inevitable, accelerating march of technology.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end, Dear Reader. I highly recommend this book, and welcome any discussion of its impact on you.