Yesterday evening I had written a good part of my blog entry when the internet went down at our house and I was unable to finish. Below is what was supposed to be yesterday’s post.
This evening I attended a Clearwater School parent chat, where parents and staff come together to talk about concerns, insight and fun things in relation to being the parent of a Clearwater student. I have a love/hate relationship with these events. On the one hand I’m intensely interested in what comes up for parents and am usually filled with admiration and awe for the courage and love Clearwater parents demonstrate on a daily basis by entrusting their kids with such freedom of self-determination over their lives. I come away with strong feelings of empathy and gratitude.
At the same time, I often feel that my contribution is inadequate and hackneyed. I hardly ever feel that I have helpful or new insights that might help support parents as they navigate their decidedly non-mainstream approach to parenting and schooling. I end up comparing what I have to say with what my staff colleagues say. To my ear, what they have to say is fresh and wise and what I have to say feels pedestrian and labored.
I hate that I set myself up to compete with people I work with (whom I admire and love) for the position of wisest sage or some such crap. It is completely counterproductive, not to mention narcissistic in the extreme. I can’t possibly win for the obvious reason that the contest exists only in my own mind. When I measure myself against them and come up short, the first reaction is anger which I bury so quickly I’m barely aware of it and transmute into self-pity. There’s something very wounded that I feel compelled to activate.
During the meeting I made an attempt to remember what I vowed (when I wasn’t in that painful emotional space) in this blog to remember –to no avail.
The paragraph above is the point I had gotten to when our internet connection failed. I’ll go on with my post having lived another day and with less heightened emotions than I had around the event last night.
I wrote in that post linked above, “I would like to respond to those moments of painful self-centeredness by seeing them clearly and shifting my perspective to include people and experiences outside myself.” To be fair to myself I did note, at the time, the painful, narcissistic feelings I was experiencing and I cast about (while simultaneously trying to catch every word of the group conversation) for what I should try to remember. I do remember having an inkling of the need to focus on someone, anyone else. But my internal demand to stay self-focused more powerful than rational thought last night.
With this sentence I gently remind myself that my goal is to move one step at a time toward greater consciousness, not perfection. It is inevitable that I will have lots of chances to interrupt my self-pity, note it and cultivate gratitude for the opportunity to practice. Just today I was involved in a parent/student conference with the two staff who were at the meeting last night. Afterward I realized I never once felt the need to compete or compare. I suspect that when more people are listening, I feel more performance anxiety which interferes with natural, creative thought and conversation.
A day is always better when there’s singing involved. Today I rehearsed at school with the Clearwater Singers and tonight I had rehearsal with the Women’s Chorale. This is the third week of our new semester so we are in the thick of learning new songs. Some come more easily than others and I can relax into them early on. Others are difficult because of tricky rhythms or difficult musical passages, and those take a lot of concentration. Each week is a little better and our director is especially skilled at efficiently working through hard parts without belaboring them, giving our brains a chance to catch up between rehearsals.
I also had some more fun at school today: did limbo with some teenage boys and another staff member (a 15-year-old boy handily beat the rest of us), walked to the gas station/convenience store with a 6-year-old girl who hopped and skipped all the way in a diaphanous dress as if she were a fairy child, and talked about things that mattered to a 10-year-old and then 15-year-old boy on the bus, a rare and precious thing.
Just now as wrote about the 6-year-old girl, I thought about how she publicly cultivates her own misery, much to the annoyance of most of us. Funny how I’ve never noticed that her suffering resembles my own, except for the public part. Now that I’ve made the connection it’s vital that I cultivate compassion for her pain and hold a space for it without getting hooked, and simultaneously wrap it around myself. I’m going to work to conjure her as touchstone when I’m stuck in my own suffering. I wonder if I’ll be able to remember.
It’s amazing how two days can feel so different. Today was good and I feel quite centered this evening. Life is an unpredictable mess of struggle and grace, and tonight I believe they are two sides of the same coin.