Honoring and Remembering Our Beloved Dead - revisited

With the recent death of my father, it felt like an appropriate time to share this post from November 2014. I know this year the holidays around October 31 will be that much more poignant.  In this post, I talk about how we are separated from the reality of death.  During these last weeks, I have been confronted by the reality of the end of life on a very personal level as I participated in decisions, witnessed the end of my father's life and engaged in how to best honor my father's life. I am grateful that we spent time with my father in the hospital both before and after his passing to say good-bye. We had an open casket visitation and vigil where other friends and family could encounter his passing, share stories and mourn with us.
As a family, we witnessed my mom offer a prayer and the bishop bless my father followed by the closing of the casket for the final time the morning of the funeral and his services were concluded graveside with the lowering of the casket and each of us tossing a flower onto the casket.  These rituals make the death more real and allow the process of healing to begin even as those same rituals break us open with the loss.

As the season turns and summer turns to fall let us take time this year to remember those we love who have died. Let us think about how we can intentionally honor them.  Maybe it is a visit to their grave or place where their ashes have been scattered.  Maybe it is setting up an altar with pictures in your home.  Maybe it is preparing their favorite foods.  It doesn't have to be complicated or take a great deal of time, just something that will be meaningful to you.

We have a tendency in our society to fear death, even deny death ... the holidays of the fall remind us that death is a part of life ... while I mourn the loss of my father, the time I was with him and my family at the end of his life has reminded me how beautiful it can also be to witness the ending of a life well lived, to midwife a life on to what comes next. Perhaps this year we can honor our losses and find the beauty in endings.

May their memories be a blessing!

Honoring and Remembering Our Beloved Dead

On this weekend when we celebrate Halloween, Samhain, Dia de los Muertos, All Saints and All Souls Day, I am posting my reflections.

This was the reflection I offered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Outer Banks on Sunday October 26, 2014.

Texts:
Story: A Gift for Abuelita - this is a wonderful video of this story created by Middle Schoolers.  We used the video in the service.
Reading:  "When Death Comes" by Mary Oliver

Today we remember and celebrate those people and pets who have died.  In our American culture we are not comfortable with death and in fact we do everything we can to avoid it.  In some circles it almost sounds like if we just eat the right foods, take care of ourselves somehow we can make death optional.  Also death has been removed from our consciousness through the professional nature of the business of death.  Most of us will die not at home but in a facility, our family will not prepare our bodies but rather professionals and more and more of us are opting for cremation.  I frequently hear discomfort with the idea of an open casket funeral or a vigil where the body is on display for a final goodbye.  The reality of death has been cleaned up and hidden away.

Yet death is something that will happen to each of us and each of us will lose those we love to death.  I know many of you have lost grandparents, parents, friends, pets and even children and grandchildren.  I worry that our cleaning up of death and hiding it away makes grief even harder since after the initial flurry of activity we act like life is supposed to go back to normal like nothing happened.  Too often people don't talk to family members about the person who has died for fear of upsetting them.  Yet we need to be upset, we need to cry and feel rage and fear.  That is all part of grief and grief is not pretty, it is not something we just get over.  Yes eventually life moves forward and we do heal but we never fully get over losing those we love. 

Ritual has been used for centuries by humans to help us grieve, to honor and remember those we have lost, to help us cope with the reality of death.  I don’t believe there is any religion or culture that does not have a way to honor and remember the dead.  Today we are lifting up the traditions of Samhain, Dia de los Muertos and the Christian holidays of All Souls and All Saints.  What is amazing is the amount of overlap in these traditions.  Both Samhain and Dia de los Muertos involve creating altars with pictures, mementos and favorite foods of the dead.  Dia de los Muertos includes visiting the graves of those lost, cleaning them and then sharing a meal at the graveyard.  This is not a morbid holiday but rather a joyous celebration of life, a celebration of storytelling, and favorite foods.  There are sugar skulls and vibrant colored flowers.  The Christian holidays were created to replace the pagan ones and also focus on ritual and story telling. All Saints lifts up those exemplars of the Christian faith and All Souls on all those who have died.  I remember in the fifth grade, dressing up as the saint I am named after, St. Margaret Mary, and going to other classes at my Catholic elementary school singing "When the Saints Come Marching In."  It is a very happy memory and I know there is a picture in my parent's house with me dressed up as a nun. 

Within Unitarian Universalism we hold a variety of beliefs about what happens after death.  Some of us hold that there is nothing after death.  Some may believe in reincarnation or a traditional heaven. Some of us are not sure and we think there might be or must be something.  Our Universalist tradition rejected that a loving God would damn anyone, no matter what they had done in life, to eternal torture and damnation. Universalism held that a loving God would reconcile all to God's self. All would be saved.  Today we are not the only UU congregation honoring and remembering the dead.  We affirm that those we love are never truly gone as we hold them in our hearts, tell their stories, make their favorite foods. They live on in our memories and in the stories we share with our children and grandchildren.  The dead may be gone but they are not forgotten.

So today we join with our ancestors who for thousands of years have been honoring those we have loved and lost.  We come together, share their pictures, their stories, their favorite foods.  We may shed some tears and we may laugh as we remember stories. It is a holy moment when through the tears of grief we also find ourselves smiling and laughing at a memory or story.

So I now invite you to stand as you are able and take a moment in silence to think about who you would like to remember this morning.  In a moment we will call out their names into the space. 

Silence -  I now invite you to call out the names of those you would like us to remember and honor this morning.

May their memory be a blessing!  May the love we share never die.  Blessed be!

Eulogy for My Father

I share this story knowing that I am sharing it as I saw it but the story is shared by others as well who may tell it differently ... all of the ways that people talk about their stories of loss are true for them so I offer you my truth.

Two weeks ago Saturday I got a call that no one wants to receive.  My sister called me in tears to say that my father had stopped breathing and he was at the hospital.  I started making arrangements to fly to California (thankfully my sister was able to pay fly my daughter and I out).  She would tell me later that night as we were continuing to make plans that the nurses were not sure he would make it through the night.  I have never willed a plane to carry my daughter and I faster.  Each time we stopped I expected to have a text or phone message that my father had died.  When I arrived and got to the hospital, my father was in the ICU, on a ventilator and enough IV lines to make him look like a cyborg.  Over the next five days we sat by my father's bed side searching for signs of awareness, signs that he was getting stronger and meeting with doctors to find out what was going on.  Each day there were decisions to be made. He did make physical progress for a brief time - breathing on his own, maintaining his blood pressure etc but while he had periods of waking up, he never seemed to really be there as much as my family and I hoped he would be.  Finally, as his physical health began to decline, we had to admit that he would not return to us and we made the difficult decision to stop life support and hours later, he slipped away peacefully early Friday morning.

I asked my mother that I be allowed to speak as his funeral.  My sister and I offered the only two eulogies during his funeral Mass in addition to a priest friend's homily.  The night before other family friends had a chance to share memories during the vigil service.  This was one of the hardest things I have written and delivered.  I am very grateful to my wife Donna, always my trusted editor, for her great work on this particular piece.  My father and I had a very complicated relationship, which over time I will need to process and work through.  In this eulogy, I sought a balance of honoring his wonderful qualities and his challenging ones - one often the shadow of the other. I loved my father and I am glad that I can remember him in his fullness.

I am grateful for the incredible outpouring of love and support my family and I have received over the past two weeks.  I saw friends and family I have not seen in decades.  While we were fortunate to have so much love around us, it was so hard to not have my wife Donna there with me, to hold me, for her to participate in the public mourning of my father.

While the public mourning is finished, the work has only begun to live life without him physically here in it.  I share this with all of you as my public remembrance of my father.

My parents and I at my graduation from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley in 2008!

John E. Sequeira
delivered Wednesday September 9, 2015

John Sequeira was many things - husband, father, brother, uncle, grandfather, friend, deacon, colleague. I know he would love the gatherings yesterday and today - except that he would want to join in the fun.  He would love seeing all of you, from so many times and places in his life. He would truly not know where to begin with saying hello and hugging you, asking how you are and about your kids and grandkids.  He was the person that if you popped into his mind, he would pick up the phone and call you.  It didn't matter how long it had been, you would pick up where you left off.  In many ways he was also a person that never met a stranger, just someone he didn't know yet. It is a testament to who he was that so many of you who were once strangers mourn his loss today with us.

I could talk with you today about all of his professional accomplishments, his commitment to the Church, his active participation in social justice, the overcoming of his own struggles in life or what a great friend he was. To be honest, it is an impossible to task to tell you all that I might in just a short period … after all, like my father, I am a preacher. What I hope to do is to talk with you about how my father most impacted my life.

I am sure it surprises those that knew us best, for me to tell you that my dad and I often had passionate and heated conversations … we sometimes had a hard time agreeing especially around politics.You see all of my life I have heard how like my father I am - whether how I look or how similar we are in character and temperament … most of the time it was about our temperament.  Both of us liked things the way WE liked them; believed what we believed intensely and loved what we loved passionately; we both struggled with our perfectionism and we each let little things really get to us. Our families saw those times when we were at our worst. Yet much of the time, including today, I am honored to be ‘just like John’ because along with those qualities that are challenging, I share his best qualities.  I also have friends in my life that I have known for decades,we both had a passion for justice and we both shared a deep love of theology and ethics.

One of my favorite theologians from the 20th Century, James Luther Adams said “An unexamined faith is not worth having, for it can be true only by accident.” Both of my parents taught me to examine my faith, but it was with my father, for the most part, that I engaged in theological discussions with, even when I was young. My father was a faithful servant of the Church, but he also showed me by example how to disagree with it conscientiously. That examination of faith has lead me into amazing encounters with people of all faiths and enabled me to develop a rich and deep spiritual life. While I am sure he was sad that I could no longer find a home in the Catholic Church, I always knew he respected my spiritual journey and the person of faith that I am.  I was proud of his work with the American Institute of Ethics and even prouder when he asked me to serve on the Board. It was amazing to work with my dad at something we shared. In recent years, we were able to share a love of multifaith engagement and dialogue.  I hope that he knew he gave me the gift of constantly seeking God in my own life.

Of course for as much as we could find common ground in our faith journeys, our shared passion for politics could lead to some serious differences in opinion.  Most of our family found it hard to be around us when politics came up.  He considered me an over the top liberal and I could not believe he wasn't.  Let's just say that political debate over the phone or the dinner table might get a tad loud and just a little heated.  Yet at the core of all this was a shared passion to make justice - we just disagreed sometimes in how we might best get there. Others might not miss those debates but I will.

The greatest gift he gave me was love and acceptance.  From her visit to meet the family, my dad knew that Donna would be around for a long time to come so over time he shared his love of golf and San Francisco with Donna.  He took her to hit a golf ball for the first time and as luck would have it, she impressed him by hitting a great first shot … Donna would say ‘she was in like Flynn’ after that.  I never had to worry that my dad would turn his back on me or not love the person I chose to love. It just happened that both my dad and Donna loved storytelling, history and he taught her to love golf. He had a gift for sharing what he loved with others.

Perhaps his most important gift was his ability to show up with gentleness and care. He was present in the hospital the day Mollie our daughter was born.  I hate needles so while they put in the IV, Dad stood there telling me it would be ok. My Dad would sometimes get frustrated with me over the small things, but when it came to the big moments he was calm, patient and loving. He, my mom and sister were waiting in the hallway when Donna brought Mollie down to meet them, Donna remembers him beaming and laughing in that way he had so you could feel his joy. Mollie is named after his grandmother, who I grew up hearing stories about all my life and I know how much that naming meant to him. He dearly loved all three of his grandchildren and he lives on in them.

I hope you will continue to share stories of my dad. I am grateful for the teacher, conversation partner, storyteller, thinker and gentle, loving man but most importantly I am glad that he was able to show me that the story of any human being is a complicated one, complete with amazing goodness and love, moments of weakness and mistakes, times of pain and joy … and worth living and examining in all its messiness.

Thank you, Dad, for showing me how to live and love with passion.

Enable is Not a Four Letter Word

The word enable has come to have very negative connotations in part because of its association with the recovery community.  There the word enable is all about keeping the addict from facing the true consequences of their addiction. It has spread outside the world of Alcoholics Anonymous and into other worlds, such as our discussions of social welfare programs and the concern that too much help leads to dependence and that we must be particularly leery of giving too much help to those who are poor or struggling.  There is an assumption that when it comes to money we should all be able to make it on our own with a few exceptions for the "truly" ill and disabled or elderly. Yet even here the assumption is that people would rather not work than work, that the poor and struggling are some how more lazy then the rest of us, more inclined to take advantage, less interested in doing for themselves.

Yet the meaning of the word enable is about making possible. It is about making it possible for something else to happen.  So when we enable another person, it is also about making it possible for them to do something they could not otherwise do.  This in and of itself is not a bad thing.  It can be an opening to possibility, it can be about providing a necessary thing for the person to be empowered to move forward, to move toward greater self-sufficiency. The challenge of course is when is our enabling helpful and when is it harmful.  There are no clear rules and each context and person is different.  Yet in this economy I think we have to start erring more on enabling and less on withholding our help and support.

Let us use for example, the life of J.K. Rowling.  J.K. Rowling is now a successful and wealthy author. She wrote the brilliant Harry Potter series which has touched adults and children alike.  Each book was made into a very successful movie - it was groundbreaking. Yet when she started writing she was on public assistance.  She wrote much of the first book in cafes.  Now in this country most public assistance would not allow a similar situation to occur here.  Yet without the generosity of the economic safety net of Great Britain, the Harry Potter books might not exist and let's face it Great Britain has by now collected far more in taxes from J.K. Rowling than they ever paid out in benefits to her.

What if we saw our public assistance or even our private assistance as ways to truly enable others? What if instead of asking what is the bare minimum, we saw our efforts as truly lifting people to a new place?  What if we took away shame and stigma and replaced it with an attitude of that all of us at one time or another is going to need something from others that we cannot do for ourselves? For some that help maybe in terms of money, others it may be learning a new skill, or a listening ear, or help moving.

Our emphasis on being independent and self-sufficient has gotten to the point where asking for or accepting any kind of assistance is something to be ashamed of, something not to be repeated.  Yet we are not self-created, self-sustaining beings. We need each other and we impact each other all the time.  Our individual choices are not independent - they have impact on others for good and ill.  All of us will find ourselves in need of help at different times of our lives whether when we are young and need caring adults or when we become ill or injured or get older.  We need each other to find and do work in the world.  Any job search book will tell you that networking with others is the single number one thing we can do to find a job. It is not just about finding job listings and sending out resumes even though that is what most people think of when they think of job hunting. I was just asked how many resumes I have sent out for my job search and yet I was not asked how many connections have I made, how have I reached out to my network - yet coaches, job advice boards will tell you it is not about the number of jobs I apply to but about the connections I make with others.  Making those connections is about asking others to enable you to find the connection to a job.  The most effective job search tool is all about asking others to enable someone to find a new job.

I think the key question to ask is "will this action on my part enable this person to greater self-sufficiency or am I doing something they could do for themselves?"  Of course we have to know whether or not the person can do it on their own. Saying to the person who has no money and no job - I won't help you because you "should" do this for yourself when they have nothing is asking for the impossible.  Telling someone who is in constant pain but may look 'normal' to you that they should be working 8 hours a day only adds to the depression and struggle of their everyday life.  This is not always about what we think someone should be able to do but rather we need to truly see the person and the situation as they truly are in the present moment and then ask will my help hurt or harm.  We may get it wrong.  I guess I would rather help and get it wrong, then not help and get it wrong. I prefer to presume the best in others and hang in there with them.  I know how good it feels both to receive needed help and to give it.  When we make enabling a bad thing then we take away the joy in giving and being needed.

 

Let's stop making the word enable a bad word and let's instead take the words of the song "Lean on Me"to heart remembering that we ALL need someone to lean on.

Life is Not Like School - Revisited

As more and more of my Facebook feed is filled with news of the return to school I thought it would

My Masters degree graduation! I did it!

be a good time to revisit this post from 2014 on "Life is Not Like School."  The end of August and beginning of September bring the preparation and start of school.  Relief for many parents who have been busy juggling work and children without the structure of the school year and others who will miss having the extended periods of time with their children.  Children and teens approach the start of school with a mix of feelings - excitement, dread, anxiety.  I personally loved the start of school.  It meant new uniforms, new school supplies and the opportunity to begin again with a blank slate. After all I was very good at school, I have excelled at it.  I love books and learning, engaging in the discussion of ideas.  College and Graduate school were wonderful times of learning, stretching, growing.  My two favorite childhood games were school and house.  I am grateful that my life has allowed me to do both.

I also wanted to share this post in light of this post by Glennon Doyle Melton from Momastery.  Like Glennon, we are parents who are more concerned that our daughter be thoughtful, brave, and kind than able to pass a standardized test or jump through hoops so schools look good.  It is a big reason that we homeschool. Our daughter is a critical thinker, she is aware of the world around her and brings a critical analytical lens to issues such as race, gender, and sexuality.  So as our children return to school let us remember that there are more important things than test scores, grades and getting into the "right" school.  

I also post this for those also looking for their next professional opportunity.  Many of us remain stuck in a school mind set when it comes to life and school.  This article posted on LinkedIn gives insight of what happens when we fail to prepare our children for LIFE in our worry about how they are doing in school.  Education is important - even more important are the ways we prepare our children for life and the type of people they become.  Are we raising ethical, loving, brave, thoughtful people or just ones who know how to get ahead at any price? Are we adults living life, a life open to learning and exploring, or still stuck in the mindset of being a student, who completes all the assignments and does what is expected?

So at the start of a new year, let's make sure that we teach our children about life and not just about school!

Life Is Not Like School

Now maybe for some of you out there this does not come as a major revelation, yet for me this hit home.  I was on a Confidence Coaching call with David Kaiser from Dark Matter Consulting and David said "Work is not like school. Your boss does not give you assignments and then you turn them and get approval."  Yet I realized when he said that how much I unconsciously expect life to work like school.

You see I am good at school. I played school as a child (it comes honest, my mother and grandmother were teachers), I have a degree from Georgetown, a Masters Degree from the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara (ok it was Berkeley when I graduated) and enough credits for an M.Div. thanks to my years at Wesley Theological Seminary and my year at Starr King.  See I got very very good at school, not to the point of being top of my class or earning top honors but I know how to do school. I know exactly how much work I needed to do to get the grade I wanted.  I had teachers who pushed me and inspired me to do my best. Probably if I had had some good mentoring and support, I probably would have done great getting a PhD and spending my life teaching.

What I realized on that call is that I keep expecting, again not consciously, for life to respond to me like school. That life will give me assignments, with clear directions as to completion, my job is to create the product that has been assigned.  Now granted graduate school did give me the opportunity to explore some of my own ideas, to create my own final project for my MTS (which was terrifying by the way). For the most part however, I was given the assignments, did the work and rewarded for my efforts.

Yet work does not work that way, certainly life doesn't work that way. Life doesn't give you assignments, it gives you experiences and opportunities.  Life is about what you will do with those experiences and opportunities. There is no guaranteed outcome.  You can do the very best job at an opportunity and you can still  fail or be fired or someone won't like it. You can be the most qualified, amazing person for a job and may not get it or you may get fired from it.  It is a myth that we base things on merit.  Only school, and even then not always, rewards merit.

What it all means? Well that it is really up to each of us.  For some people being fired from a job is the best thing that has ever happened to them.  They are overjoyed (oh sure it may sting) or if not overjoyed they are relieved.  Others it is truly the end of the world and they can't recover. They may take their life.  They may sink into a depression that it will take them months or years to emerge from.  Some are born into situations of incredible adversity and they are able to overcome it and for others, far too many others, they can't. Yet somehow we expect them to.  It is about the story we tell ourselves and too often the story we have been told to tell ourselves.  Far too often others tell us what an event or experience is supposed to mean, and far too often we listen and believe it.  So if you are told often enough - you will never amount to anything, your circumstances are too far gone then chances are you will believe it even if your soul is screaming "No No No No!"

Also key is that in life we are not in control. You see school taught me that I was in control. That as long as I did the work assigned and got the right answers I would be rewarded. I was taught it didn't matter if I didn't like my teacher, it didn't matter what other students did or did not do, I was master here and whatever I did or did not do was all that mattered. Yet in life other people do matter. In fact those people who overcome all the odds, behind them you will find teachers, mentors, parents who supported them, believed them, coached them. They help silence the voices that say it won't ever be different. I was blessed by amazing educational opportunities and yes, while I created some of that myself, so much of it came because of my family, where I was born, what I was given, what I was not in control of in the least.

In addition, somewhere along the way, maybe because I went to all Catholic schools growing up, my initial ideas about vocation were very much like school. God has a plan for each of us, each of us has a gift to give the world. Our job is to figure out what God has planned for us - the assignment - then we are to live that out as best we can and then at the end God will let us know how well we did.  Now obviously if you read this blog, you know that my ideas, thoughts and reflections about vocation have grown beyond this. Yet this still resides within.  One thing we often forget in developmental theory is that whether we are talking about stages of moral development, faith development, emotional development etc. we all still have the stages within us. Just because I am not just at the magical thinking stage of faith development doesn't mean that part of me doesn't still practice it - particularly at times of stress.  So sometimes when it feels really hard, I think I didn't get the assignment right, or that I am not doing the assignment the way I am supposed to (goodness knows there have been enough people letting me know that they don't think I have it right or that I am doing it the right way in the least) - then I need to stop.  I need to be reminded that life is not school, there is no assignment and I am not necessarily doing it wrong. It is just hard right now - so as one of my favorite memes right now says "Yell Plot Twist and Move On."

So life is not like school.  It is not about assignments and checking off requirement lists.  God doesn't hand out assignments along with hair and eye color.  Life is more like home school.  You have to dive in and figure it out. You have to follow your interests and figure out they ways you learn best.  As a homeschool parent who was schooled, my first task was to let go of what it means to "learn" to be "educated" and what school "has" to look like.  Our home school does not look anything like school as I experienced it.  Our homeschool is experimental, involves cooking, videos, books, and lots and lots of talking.  Oh and the thing that is the most different?  We do it as a family.  While Donna takes the lead, I get to come along on the field trips. If I post the article about the lunar eclipse at 3 am (why are astronomical events always at 3 am?) then I am the one getting up to see if we can see it.  School does not happen between 8 and 3, M through F with summers off. Homeschool happens whenever and wherever - like life does!

The key to vocation and to life is making a study of yourself, of who you are.  It is understanding who you are at your core, not the person you are supposed to be, not your parent's dream of who you are or would be, not the person society says you should want to be.  Life and vocation are about fully and authentically becoming the person you came into this world to be.  The person you have to be because your soul will not let you be anything less!  When will you graduate? Only when your life is done!

I Never Imagined

I never thought I would find myself here, in this situation.  It wasn't supposed to happen to me.  Not me.  This happens to others - lazy unworthy others who are to blame for their own predicament.  Yet here is where I find myself.  Is this my fault?  I keep wondering, how did I get here?  Where did I make the wrong turn? 

Then the questions turn again:  What if it isn't only a result of my choices?  What if my choices met bad luck, and other people's choices?  What if stuff just happens? 

Finally: Really does it matter how I got here? Does it matter if it is my fault or not or somewhere in between?  Did I "attract" this? (what does that even mean?) Is this someone's will for me?  If so, who and who would be so cruel? (God, and if so what kind of God can be called love and yet act with such cruelty)  And again does it matter?

Really all that matters is that here I am.  There is no choice but to move forward (or maybe not but what would not moving forward even be?).   The only option is to keep going, keep making choices, do the best I can.  Then maybe one day I can tell this story, in its fullness. Maybe it will help someone show more compassion or someone know they are not alone. For now I can only speak in vague questions, vague references.  Later it will be time to tell the story but right now I can't sort it all out.  This chapter is not yet ended and until I know what happens I can't sort out all its meanings and nuances.

In the meantime, I pray, I write, I keep reaching out. I keep seeking, looking for options, making choices looking for a way through.  For there is no over, no out, there is only through.  I am not sure what I will find on the other side, I have some ideas but I don't know.  I know I am more compassionate. I know that this opened my eyes, my mind and my heart.  I know things now that I did not know before.  I have an empathy for people who struggle in ways I did not before.

 

Most of the time I have hope, I know I will make it through. I know I am not alone.  Yet there are other times I am not as sure and all I can do is pray and ride it through reminding myself it will get better, this will pass, nothing stays the same. I remind myself of the blessings, that this isn't all that is true for me even it feels overwhelming and all encompassing.  The only thing I know for sure is that this will change for change is inevitable, everything changes.  May it change for the better, sooner rather than later.

 

No, I never imagined myself here and the question is what will I do now that I am. I can't move forward if I keep looking back wondering how I got here.  I have no ability to go back and change the past, there is only moving forward and even with that there is no guarantee, no assurance of success.  My choices are to give up or to keep moving forward and for now I choose to move forward.

Where have you found yourself that you never imagined; that you were not supposed to be? 

What gets you through?  Will you choose to keep moving forward or is there a time to surrender, 

a time to just let go? How will you know?

Good Enough - Revisited

This seems like the perfect (I know another pun!) time to re-post this piece from March on Good Enough.  I am deep into the job search and our housing search here in Richmond.  I love being here in Richmond. It is a wonderful city, with amazing murals on the buildings, so much rich history, and a wide diversity of people.  I have connected in with a great group for networking and have already had the chance to do some training for them.  I am working part-time at Food Lion.  Housing is a challenge and we are still in temporary housing. This is truly no time to be focused on perfection and yet conversely with the pressure on to find a job quickly, perfectionism tends to rear its ugly head. The running dialogue in my head can sound something like this:  "Am I networking perfectly; am I seeking out enough opportunities; oh and those follow ups; and are my cover letters perfect enough." So this is an important reminder to me at this time and I hope you find it helpful as well!

Moving and temporary housing are expensive particularly when you only have a part-time job. If you are so moved, any donation you could make to help support us is deeply appreciated! Blessings! 

Good Enough

I recently read this article on The Power of 'Good Enough' in The Atlantic.  I am a perfectionist and often find myself surrounded by other perfectionists. Certainly I was raised in a home that far too often taught that I must be perfect - perfect grades, perfect behavior, perfect perfect perfect.  I learned early that anything less, any mistake was all my fault and that I should have somehow known better. Learning was not a process of making mistakes but rather knowing the right answer, every single time.  Now in fairness to my parents, they too are perfectionists raised by parents who also taught them that they had to be perfect, had to measure up, had to meet their expectations. I know that for my mother, her mother's amazing, ceiling breaking career instead of inspiring her gave her a sense of not measuring up and for my father, failing to make real his mother's expectation that he become a doctor resulted in a man who again never measured up, never quite made it. So the concept of "Good Enough" is truly foreign to me in some ways.

On the one hand it makes perfect sense (yes that pun was intended!) that we have to make choices and that most of the time good enough is enough, probably even more than enough.  After all there is no perfect mate, perfect marriage, perfect career, perfect faith.  Most of life, and certainly the most important things life are messy and imperfect.  Yet how many of us are plagued by the disease of perfection?  I know in my religious circle of Unitarian Universalists we are a people of perfection. For all our embracing of a diversity of faith, we are communities of professionals - academics, doctors, lawyers, community leaders and with that comes a sense of high expectation and we are not very good at learning to embrace mistakes.  I remember once in a UU setting someone posted a disparaging joke in an email, without the intention to do harm but the impact was immediate.  There was an immediate and swift response to the email that included statements that they didn't know if they could be in a community where such things were posted. My response to this whole situation was to know that I could never make a mistake within that context for fear that repercussions would be fast and furious. Again the expectation in some places is that our anti-oppression work must be perfect.

So one of the things I realized as I read this post is that I have been paralyzed by thinking that there is this one perfect job or career out there - the one that will use my gifts and skills and pay me well and that I will enjoy and oh that is my calling. Oh no pressure there!  I have written repeatedly on this blog about vocation and really wrestling to listen to my life, to realize that maybe the Holy is less concerned with the specific job or career and more concerned that I take my whole, deep authentic self to the work - whatever it is.  I wrestle over and over again with this idea that there is a job out there that I am supposed to have and be doing and that I just have not found it yet.  I know that I have found a number of jobs that don't work, or no longer work.  Oh and that is the other thing I wrestle with - that once I find this ideal job or career I am supposed to stay in forever, it is supposed to be the perfect thing forever.  What if it is really ok that each job or career has been the right job or choice for that period of time but now it is time for something different, something new because I am different, I have not remained the same.

What would it mean to have a good enough job?  What is the job that is good enough for now?  What is most important to me at this stage of my life?  I know that we want to be settled into a location for the long term and we have decided that place will be Richmond, Virginia.  I know I want a job that will support the three of us and that we stop living on the edge financially.  I know I want time to pursue things like forming a Georgetown Alumni Club in Richmond (there is no Alumni club anywhere in Virginia - what is up with that?!). I want to join a book club.  I want to take yoga and work out.  I want to cultivate friends and community.

So what is this good enough job?  I know that I am an excellent teacher, facilitator, program creator and director, writer and speaker.  I know that I love technology and love learning new technology.  I love the ways social media and technology connect us around the world.  I am working with a start up Maker Space and one of the reasons this excites me is that it is about bringing people together to create and learn together - learning that involves mistakes, learning through finding out what doesn't work. That is exciting to me!

So I am working on embracing a good enough job and wondering what might happen if I open myself to all sorts of possibility. What if I can really learn to let go of perfection?  What if I can free myself from the pressure and restrictions that the quest for perfection brings with it?  Because the reality is that perfection is paralyzing.  I get so worried about getting it wrong, or being found to be less than that I put things off, don't put myself out there, become highly self-conscious.  In my quest to be perfect and not get anything wrong, I put my light under basket.

So maybe my true calling is to discover the gift of "good enough." And maybe, in finding the position that is 'good enough' ... I will find myself being proud of the work I do, my gifts being useful and my personal life more fulfilling. Perhaps, then my light can really shine brightly.

What do you think?

I Don't Make a Good Nomad - Revisited

Well it is just over a year later and I am once again finding myself a nomad. One thing we are working on for this move is that Richmond will be our final settling down place.  We are so excited to be here. Now we just need a place to call home and I am working hard at finding a job.

Here is to hoping that this will be a very short nomadic period and that we will soon be settling into a new life here in Richmond, VA!

In the meantime, a reminder about how I am really quite a bad nomad!

Happy Thursday!

I Don't Make a Good Nomad

Over the past few months my family and I have been rather nomadic.  We moved out of Williamsburg in February and then we have lived in three different places here on the Outer Banks before finally landing in our place for this year in Kitty Hawk.  This weekend we were finally able to get our stuff from storage in Williamsburg (we landed here June 1 and have been doing a modified form of camping here in our new place). We have most of our stuff  although it wouldn't quite all fit on the truck (yes this is where you just go UGH!!!). So now I am writing to you from our couch (hooray!) surrounded by boxes and nothing quite where it should be. All three of us are exhausted and sore from lifting and carrying.

I have new found respect for Sarah and Abraham, the Israelites who wandered the dessert for forty years and all the other nomads of the Hebrew Scriptures. That is way too much packing and unpacking. Way too much of not being settled.  I would have been one of the loudest complaining Israelites and probably would have been barred from ever actually entering the Promised Land because of it.  Ok maybe not and I actually think the Divine is much much more benevolent that that but certainly the other Israelites would have been done with me.  Let's just leave it that I would never make it as a permanent nomad. 

One reason I am terrible nomad is that I need way too much stuff with me.  I get a tad too frustrated with missing certain items - you know like spatulas and our really good knife!  We love to cook and we were very lucky that in most of the places we stayed the kitchens were well stocked. When we finally landed here we had very limited kitchen supplies (hence the no spatula and no good knife).  Secondly the constantly living out of bags, packing up our belongings every few weeks meant that I never felt settled and once I would get settled we were off again. I have discovered I have a deep need for place - I really need to have a place to spread out and call home.  Finally we are here and so is our stuff (ok most of our stuff) and all that is left is the long hard work of unpacking and finding homes for all our belongings.  We unpack knowing that we are here for this year and then life will shift again. My goal for this year is to put down roots, not hold back, enjoy all the Outer Banks has to offer and then know that I lived fully while I was here and knowing that I only have a certain amount time to enjoy it.  I am going to risk it being hard to say goodbye!  And I am certainly going to enjoy not being a nomad for the next eleven months!

Ah yes now to the unpacking!

So are you a nomad or not so much?  What are your best and worst memories of moving?
What makes a place home for you?

By the way moving is very expensive and if you are willing, any contributions would help us get settled more

quickly!  Thanks in advance!