Category Archives: personal growth

Acceptance

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Two plutonium bombs in different locations. The only way to save the world is to defuse them at exactly the same 1/10th of a second, but only after the detonation key is deactivated from yet another location. And that cannot happen until the countdown has started, which gives the hero team fifteen minutes to get it all done.
“Okay,” badass girl hero says.
No denial, no, “That can’t be, you’ve got to be kidding me, there must be another way.”
Just, “Okay.”
And they get to it, one step at a time, improvising, committed together and flexing around obstacles one after another. In typical action movie fashion, the villain dies a karmically satisfying death, the heroes prevail, justice is served, and the world never knows it was miliseconds away from nuclear annihilation.
Props if you can name the movie. 😉

How do I do acceptance well already?
–I totally get it in my thinking mind; and when the thing I must accept is not emotionally charged, I adapt easily and take everything in stride. Flexibilty helps with this, and my life is generally smooth sailing.
–I’m better able now to recognize when I don’t actually fully accept something–when recognizing it intellectually is not enough to get to peace with it.
–When this happens, I can sit with the discomfort–accept it–and let is pass. I tell myself it’s normal and human to have a hard time with deep inner conflicts, that self-awareness in service of reflection, regulation, and more right action is a lifelong learning journey.

How could I do better?
–I need to find a better bridge between cognitive and emotional acceptance. I understand what is happening. I don’t like it, and get that I don’t have control. I recognize where I have agency and not. And yet, I still end up wallowing in irritation, anger, sadness, and resentment. Less frequently each year than the last, and less severely now than before, but sheesh, how long before I can just roll easier with it all and suffer less, FFS?
–Breathe breathe breathe. Maybe prayer? Writing definitely helps. Keep doing the work.
–Or (and?) just accept that this amount of mild to moderate pain and suffering is just par for the course? Huh.

How does society already do well at acceptance?

Is this mostly about inclusion? So many of my posts this month relate to identity, both individual and collective. No matter who you are or what there is about you, it seems easier now than ever to find those who will see, understand, accept, and even love you. They may not be physically local, but you can find literature, resources, and virtual communities to bond over almost anything, it seems. The caveat is that our culture is so emotionally charged right now, non-acceptance threatens to overtake and drive our collective in- and out-group encounters, dividing us more than uniting, making acceptance something we don’t even strive for anymore.

How could we all do better together?

Ask better questions. What is it that we need to do better at accepting, exactly? Facts? Fundamental disagreements? Conflicting values and goals? Shared ones? What questions will give us clarity on what is, and help us resist the urge to ignore, deny, dismiss, and minimize? How can we get to “Okay,” and move with calm and equanimity, peace and purpose, and even joy, toward what could be? What does “Okay” feel like, when/where have we felt it before, and how did we get there?

Maybe the first steps toward peaceful and productive acceptance, among others, are curiosity, non-judgment, and openness to learning. The primary reward and benefit of true, honest, cognitive and emotional acceptance, and what I long for most, is inner peace. I want this so much because I know that wherever and whenever I have inner peace about something, that peace lifts me. It exudes with a palpable force, and my impact on my surroundings is positive. When my innards are turbulent, conflicted, and agitated, I’m not the only one who suffers.
*sigh*
Onward. It is through the struggles that we grow.

Commitment

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Okay friends, last third of the month! How’ ya doin’, bored to tears? I’m having a BLAST! 😀
This is such good training for a daily writing discipline, sitting down with a skeleton plan and only a little flesh, healthy but stringy. Each writing session lifts some weight, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, and over time muscle appears, strengthening some part of a larger body of message. Ooo, maybe I can set a mental vision for the BFHP (book)… acorn to oak tree? Clark Kent boy to teen to Superman? 7th grade to varsity volleyball team? Or ooo, Queen Lenora from Emma Chase’s Royally Series Collection–princess to queen great grandmama… Anyway, motivation and energy to complete the book has persisted and accelerated for about five months now, which is exponentially more than at anytime in the last 8 years. Yay! So, onward, my peeps, 8 more to go and beyond!

How do I commit well already?
–It may take me a long time, but once I decide to do something, I usually follow through. Piano, med school, marriage, parenthood, leadership, blog, and now book. When one commitment conflicts with another (eg leadership vs parenting in 2021), I can usually prioritize pretty easily.
–I have clarity about my commitments. I reconcile them with core values, ethics, goals, relationships, and circumstances.

How could I commit better going forward?
–Focus. I was just thinking today how Husband has very focused and stable interests. Me, I have serial obsessions, often more than one at a time… A victim of FOMO, some might call me. But everything is just so interesting!! So I can essentialize; I’ll have to if I want to get this book written.
–Establish routines. Ethos workouts are now a solid 2-3 sessions per week, on set days and times with flexibility as needed. I have a bedtime alarm set, and Steve West on the Sleepiest app waiting to tell me a story or guide a meditation, so I’m motivated to get to bed, yay! Ooo, I could find set times to indulge in social media…FB and IG limits, here we come, boo hoo. It’s a looooong shot, and probably worth another try…
—Accountability. Posting a writing photo on IG every Sunday and then logging daily activity for the following week in the comments has been fun! I can look at my IG gallery and see the laptop with a different mug each time, and I look forward to reporting. My mugs are meaningful, and now I get to share them. I’m keeping a public log, but it’s not in anybody’s face–so it’s mostly for me and I also know anyone can call me out. I think it could work!

How does society do commitment well?
Honestly having a hard time with this one, my friends. Trying to think of what, exactly, we are committed to, as a collective? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? How does that manifest, for everybody? For every potential value or goal that comes to mind, I can think of some who are committed and others who oppose–or at least apparently so. These days it feels like the only thing we are collectively committed to is being right, proving others wrong, and winning whatever fight engages our attention at the moment.

So maybe we need to scale down the question? What commitments do you and your overlapping cohorts uphold well right now? What are you committed for and/or against? What are your committed objectives, short and long term? Why? At the end of your life, how will you be at peace with your commitments? With society’s?

…Then again, maybe science? Medicine? Social programs? Diplomacy? Justice? Lots of people are committed to these things, which I admire. So maybe I need to reframe–maybe it’s too optimistic to expect, or even wish for, any universally shared collective commitments?

How could we do better together?
But maybe it’s not too optimistic. At the end of the day I sincerely believe we all want the same things for ourselves, and for one another, to varying degrees. Right now it seems like too many people tell the story that the pie is too small, and if someone else gets more then I and mine necessarily get less. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s not wrong–except in premise–humans are remarkably creative; we can all get what we need. There have been historical periods of shared collective commitment, such as World War II and post-911 (somewhat). The Civil War and 1960s, and now, feel like epitome periods of division.

25% of the way through The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe, written in 1997, I actually feel better about the future of humanity than I did last week. I’ve been thinking that we are all now headed straight to our inevitable collective demise, but these authors posit that every Unraveling/Crisis period feels like that, and we always come out of it into a High and then an Awakening, in recurring cycles about every 80-100 years:

“First comes a High, a period of confident expansion. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion. Then comes an Unraveling, in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis—the Fourth Turning—when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history.
“Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history. The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a long human life, each composed of four twenty-year eras—or “turnings”—that comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth. Illustrating this cycle through a brilliant analysis of the post–World War II period, The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for this rendezvous with destiny.”

I withhold judgment on the authors’ conclusions so far, but their thesis seems plausible…

In the end, I suppose we each/all must decide what goals, activities, etc. are worth our precious time, energy, and resources, both individually and collectively. I have no illusions of actual world peace. I’d just like a little less hard core, mindless, violent, local and global conflict, maybe in my lifetime? So: What commitments can we each and all make, in our nested and overlapping cohorts and communities, to get closer to that?

Judgment

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How do you feel about judgment? When/what are you most likely to judge quickly and negatively? Do you notice when this happens? Is it okay? How does it affect your mood, conversations, and relationships? How does your judgment help you and those you love? When does the judgment of others hurt you? How do you think we could all do it better?

How do I do judgment well already?
–I make evaluative judgments a lot less often now than in the past. For instance when I dislike an outfit, I say it’s not for me rather than call it outright ugly. I keep my individual, subjective opinions as such, rather than declaring them mindlessly as universal objective truths.
–Similarly about people, I identify behaviors and actions separately from people themselves. A kind person can do unkind things; an honest person may sometimes tell a lie. When I witness one unkind or untrue thing, that does not necessarily define the person’s whole character. At my best, observing a nonvirtuous action by someone I know to be virtuous prompts me to check in with them and see if they are okay.
–I can withhold judgment a long time; I tolerate uncertainty and stay open for any interaction or relationship to evolve toward connection, even if it starts out far from it. I attend conscientiously to my lack of complete information to minimize misjudging, which too often leads to hurting people and damaging relationships.

How could I do better?
–Once I make a negative evaluative judgment about a person, group, or institution, I let that bias lead thereafter. In many cases I can keep the door to changing my mind open at least a crack, but I know which doors are shut and locked today. I could open my mind to the possibility that people and organizations can change; I could unlock those doors.
–I can mitigate my meta-judgment. I value open-mindedness and curiosity and loathe narrow-mindedness and knee-jerk early closure. Thus, I judge others’ (and my own) judgment acutely and strongly in the negative. Funny how this makes me exactly what I hate. Working on it–with mindfulness, self-compassion, forgiveness, accountability, and perspective taking… This is my work.

How does society do judgment well today?

Dialectical Behavior Therapy. More and more, DBT integrates into mainstream talk therapy, and some places are even incorporating DBT skills into school curriculum. DBT teaches us to distinguish between evaluative and discriminating judgments:
–Evaluative: “stating something as a whole and objectively. It is taking the facts of a situation and adding personal preferences, values, and opinions to make it an objective truth. This type of judgment is ineffective because others may view the same situation differently, whether it is marginally different or completely different.”
–Discriminating: “reflect personal preferences and subjective opinions. They are considered judgments that are effective in terms of not projecting one’s perception as a complete conclusion.”
The more this distinction enters general consciousness and awareness, the less our differences and disagreements may escalate into outright opposition and hatred.

How can we all do better?

Stop reinforcing click-bait, incendiary soundbites, oversimplification, and overgeneralization. Before forming and rendering an opinion on anything:
–Ask whether an opinion or position is even necessary–is it worth the time, energy, and resources?
–Vet the information: How reliable is the source? What is their motivation?
–Look for contrary examples of an initial judgment; evaluate honestly the merits of both/all sides of a debate
–Commit to disengaging from information sources–including people–that/who incite, amplify, and perpetuate hair-trigger judgment

BREATHE. Take time. Most things are not an emergency, and additional information is readily available. This is the harder, longer, more complicated path, this slowing and elevation of judgment. And certainly some situations require immediate decision and action. But knee-jerk is too often our collective default judgment setting, and we need better balance.

Make more generous assumptions, at least initially. I would rather regret being too kind than not kind enough. The proverb that people rise or descend to our expectations of them is at least partially true. Since we all make evaluative judgments anyway, why not show up to people in a way that invites–calls–their best selves forth? We can sense one another’s judgments, verbalized and overtly expressed or not. Body language and tone of voice reveal us. So let us be less judgmental, so that we can seem so, also. It’s the honest thing to do.

I really enjoyed thinking about this topic tonight. It reminds me how easily we can fall into oversimplified, dichotomous thinking (and judgment, HA!) about judgment–that it’s all bad and we should eliminate it altogether, or that it’s always necessary in all situations lest we don’t know what we think about anything. Maybe we can think of judgment as a tool, a skill–something we can exercise mindfully to help us make sense and meaning, both individually and collectively. At its best, judgment provides clarity, direction, and connection. At its worst, it polarizes, instigates, and leads to violence. We can each and all do our part to bend the long, human, moral arc toward the former.