Sacrifices?

Last night, Michael and Aidan and I ate our first dinner of the season on our front deck (Naomi ate hers in bed—she’s had the stomach flu but she’s much much better now). In the slanting, late sunset, I ate a big salad with fresh eggs from my chickens, I watched the waves rolling in, and drank a fine New Zealand Sav Blanc. My life felt almost painfully unfair to me, as if my sitting there on my front deck was a hording of all manner of good things that now others couldn’t have because of my selfish life. Michael talked about how we had made many sacrifices to get here. Have we? What kind of sacrifices to we always make to get from here to there and how do we understand them in the moment? How do we understand them in the long run? And so I’ve been wondering about what it takes to get from where you are now to the next place.

Those of you who have been reading here long enough (or trolling back far enough), will see that my landing in New Zealand was not smooth or effortless. It is a hard thing to come around the world from a life you love to a new country, and it is a hard thing to build a new life, brick by brick. We made some terrible mistakes that first, impulsive year, mistakes which cost us in dollars and heartache. And then we bought this house, which I often thought of as my folly, and we poured everything into it. I was without a road map for the first time in a long long time, and I was lost.

Now, at the end of that part of the journey, we simply live here. We no longer struggle about where to live or how to live, but we just live. We work here. Aidan and Naomi race around the village on the weekends, checking in with us every couple of hours before disappearing with a pack of their friends into the park or down to someone’s house. We garden. The chickens make funny noises and lay eggs. Our house is constantly filled with people, our family, our friends, the lovely WWOOFERs who come and stay, the sometimes-mostly-unknown acquaintances who find themselves in our guest room, pondering the Tasman sea from their air bed.

I wonder how readers out there think about the sacrifices they’ve made to get to where they are, and how you even think about “sacrifice” on your way from here to there, or whether it’s all just called “life” and the choices we make. Today I’m watching perfect sky, brilliant waves, sparkling green hills. I’m inside, working hard on the billions of deadlines coming my way (you can check out a big part of my work at shiftingthinking.org). Is this a sacrifice? A joy? Or just one lucky woman, living life as hard as she can?


Pictures today are of last night, and of the “spring show” (these are mostly posted for John and Sheena who were as mystified about what that would be as I was. And also to John and Sheena—sorry about the beautiful sunset pictures 30 hours after your departure. Come back and next time there will be beautiful sunsets while you’re actually here!)

Theorising change

Another satisfying sunset, this one from above the clouds which have been our near-constant companions these last wintery weeks. I am on the flight from Rotorua to Wellington, having finished speaking at a hui (=meeting) today. I am feeling full and satisfied (in a more spiritual than physical sense as I haven’t eaten much).

Today I talked with people at the School Support Services, a conglomeration of folks who sit alongside teachers and principals and try to help them improve their practice in one way or another. I didn’t want to do another keynote, but the people here were most persistent and convinced me I really was the right person for this—and that it wouldn’t be just another keynote, but was instead a chance for deep engagement. And they were right! What a lovely bunch of people and what fun we had today!

But the thing I’ve been teaching about today is William Bridges, and I’ve gone back and reread his books in preparation for the workshop. As I led the group through their thinking about the endings in their life and their work and into the neutral zone, I couldn’t help but be so grateful that I have made it through to the other side of the neutral zone and into a more settled place. I’m watching what has helped me reach into this new space to see whether there is theorising to be done that comes from my own experience.

So I think you could make a qualitative analysis of this blog and look at issues of control (and letting go) and power and powerlessness and new ways of getting and staying grounded in a new place (sunset now blood-orange, deep and luminous and impossibly beautiful on the horizon with inky black-blue sky with first stars hovering to take over once the orange is done showing off). I think I have been waiting in hibernation for the new possibility of this place to emerge—which it has, these last months.

Bridges tells us that the first step in a transition is mourning those things which have ended—a letting go. The second step is moving into the neutral zone and being uncertain about where you might be going next or what the future might hold. In my experience, that was another form of letting go, a way of watching without being attached to particular outcomes—or even being attached to the finding of particular outcomes. It was all an exercise in groundlessness, in letting go and getting my legs used to not having the solid land underneath me. It was all open an amorphous and wonderfully and terrifyingly full of possibility.

I notice that the physical metaphors of tide coming and going, moon waxing and waning, seasons changing—all of these rhythms held me. I could believe tomorrow would be better than a disastrous today because the southerly would blow in and be freezing and terrifying and then blow out and leave the air more crisp than I knew air could be. What would this transition have been like in a more urban space, or an uglier one? How to people manage to get through these difficult psychological spaces without the grounding of natural rhythms? Surely I would have made it through all my other life transitions without thinking of the tide or the moon. But here they were central to my making it through.

I’m also beginning to believe that in that space, the house renovation—a tactile way to progress through all these stages—was a balm for me. There were times when the house was ripped to shreds and money was leaking out the gaping windowless walls, but the solid metaphor of house coming undone, being terribly ugly, and then coming together again—this physical process mirrored the emotional process of watching my life get pared down to the stud beams, agonising over where to put walls and doors, and finally building it up again. (If only Dave could have been the chippy on my personal reconstruction plan, which I undertook without general contractor or permits from the Council.) Before we even moved into this house, I knew where all of the light switches would be and what it would feel like to knead bread at the counter. The house was made up in my head before it was made up in the physical world, and moving in just completed the metaphor for me. Talk about a visioning of the future that I was moving toward; I dreamt the house and now dream in the house.

But there is learning and relearning in the new beginnings space too. Now the job isn’t letting go, but reclaiming. Reclaiming a sense of what we could all do together, of what is possible. Reclaiming a sense of direction and focus. Reclaiming an idea of what I’m intentionally building rather than moving aimlessly with the tides. Here there are decisions to be made. Too much opportunity is overwhelming; too much plenty creates scarcity.

Here the metaphor moves out into the garden. Rather than simply wandering through the garden and feeling overwhelmed, I am making firm decisions. Walking through the garden with Sergio the magnificent WWOOFer last week, I waved vaguely at things that needed weeding. “What about this?” he asked, pointing to the monkey grass clumps. Hmm. That monkey grass was planted intentionally—lovingly, perhaps—by someone who used to live here, and it’s thrived in the shaded damp places outside my writing room. And I have left it there for the sake of the person who planted it and because something thriving should just be left to thrive. It turns out, though, that maybe that was a neutral zone perspective. You see, I hate monkey grass, wouldn’t plant it myself, and would be delighted if it all died. “Pull it all out,” I told Sergio with some force. “All this?” he asked. I got down on my knees in the dirt and began digging, digging into the sandy soil. “All of it,” I told him, hands clutched around the tuberous roots. “This is my garden, and I hate that stuff.” More letting go, this time of something I can take a stand and say I don’t want.

And thus I come to the paradox. All of life is about letting go, all of life is about holding on. These are the rhythms of our living and our growing and our dying. So the phases of transition as Bridges describes them are more about the life energy from which these rhythms emerge rather than any particular pattern (like my earlier belief that a time of endings is about letting go and a time of new beginnings is about holding on). When I feel clear about which things to hold on to and which things to let go of, I experience the holding on and letting go as lovely punctuation marks in my day—I am making a beginning and moving in an intentional direction. When I am lost and bewildered and unanchored, I experience them as inside an agony of potential regret—the ending and neutral zone spaces. The new beginning is giving me clarity of purpose and decisions, confidence and faith that the direction I pick now is the best one for me at this time, based on the current image I have of the future. Before that new beginning emerges, my decisions come out of a wandering space, and without principled reasons for my decisions, there’s every possibility that I’ll come to regret later a decision I made without clear principles today.

There’s learning here, just out of the corner of my eye, and it’s now too late and I’ve been yammering on too long to hold on to it. I will take the lovely gift given to me by the people I worked with today—and the card inscribed in te reo Maori and in English—and I will know with some satisfaction that on this day, I made decisions which led me in directions I feel good about. And I’ll return on the train to my monkey-grass-free garden and hear the gentle murmurs of the chickens in the distance and know that however I might describe this pattern, there is joy woven through it.

ps pictures today are before and after of the top part of the back yard, and, of course, the chooks (Joy in the front, Cocoa behind, and Star poking her head around the henhouse in the back)