by Heather Plett | Dec 30, 2016 | Uncategorized
I had an experience earlier this week that won’t leave me alone. This is my first attempt at giving meaning to something that I may still be processing weeks from now…
I had left my vehicle parked on the street and was walking toward the restaurant where I was meeting a friend when I came across a blind man, stumbling over snowbanks with his white cane. It was clear that he was disoriented and was having a great deal of trouble navigating his way down sidewalks that have not yet been cleared of the foot of snow left behind by a blizzard on Boxing Day. His cane was tapping the edges of the narrow paths other people’s footsteps had left in the snow, trying to make sense of a landscape that was very different from what it was just two days before.
I was running late, but I knew I couldn’t, in good conscience, walk past without offering support. “Would you like some assistance?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I stepped off the bus and got turned around and now I don’t know which way to go.”
“Where are you trying to get to?” I asked.
“Home,” he said, with some anxiousness in his voice. “I need to find my way home.”
“Where do you live?”
He gave me the address, but I wasn’t quite sure which street he was talking about. There are two streets in that neighbourhood that always mix me up.
“Do you know any landmarks? Buildings close to your home that might help me figure out the direction we need to go in?”
“It’s not far from the firehall,” he said.
“Oh – I know where the firehall is, but you’re going the wrong direction. Follow me.” He put his hand on my shoulder. We’d only gone a short way when I could tell that there was something wrong.
“This doesn’t feel like the right direction,” he said. “Can you see a short apartment building close to us?”
“No, I can’t see that from where we’re standing. But if it’s close to the firehall, it must be in this direction.”
“I need a phone,” he said, the frustration and distrust of my abilities growing in his voice. “I need to call my worker. She’ll come out and get me.”
I pulled out my phone, dialled the number he gave me, and spoke to his worker. She said she couldn’t come out to get him and wasn’t able to give me much more helpful information than he could give. “It’s close to the A&W,” she said before she hung up.
“She won’t come out,” I told the man, whose name I now knew.
“She HAS to come out. It’s her job! She’s just being stubborn. And she’s not from here so she doesn’t know her way around.”
“I can see the A&W from where we’re standing,” I said.. “We’ll figure this out. Let’s head back in the direction we came from.” We started walking, once again with his hand on my shoulder, slowly navigating the narrow path that wove between snowbanks and over the frozen hills snow plows left behind.
He hesitated when I started to turn the corner toward A&W. “It still feels like we’re going in the wrong direction. I think my building’s across the street. On the same side of the street as A&W, but across the street from where we are now.”
What he said made no sense to me and I could tell he was getting increasingly flustered.
“We’re just going to keep walking until we find your place,” I said. “I’m not going to leave you until you’re at your front door. We’re on the right street now, and once I can see some street numbers on buildings, we’ll find it.” (In case you’re wondering why I didn’t look on Google maps, it simply didn’t occur to me until it was over.)
We started walking, I finally found a road sign and a street number that narrowed down the search, and after a few more hills and narrow pathways, we were at his door.
“Thank you,” he said as he opened his door.
“Happy New Year,” I said and went to meet my friend.
****
I can’t get that brief encounter with the blind man out of my mind.
First, it was the reminder of my privilege as a person with sight that struck me. I walk around this city in the winter time, navigating the snowbanks and the frozen bits with some degree of challenge, but never giving much thought to how much more difficult the journey would be if I didn’t have sight. What if all of the things you normally rely on as a person without sight – your memory of the feel of the sidewalk under your feet, the edges of buildings and curbs, and the sound of your tapping cane reverberating against walls – are suddenly wiped out by the blanket of snow?
How would I learn to navigate if the landscape suddenly changed and none of my abilities had yet adapted to the change?
But there is more to this story that is still formulating in my consciousness.
What does it mean to help someone find home? To be the blind leading the blind? To be one lost soul on the street helping another lost soul get back to where they belong?
Today, when I shared this story on a call with The Helpers’ Circle, someone reminded me of the Ram Dass quote… “We’re all just walking each other home.”
Yes, that’s what we were doing. In my stumbling, bumbling way, I was walking him home. He didn’t have much reason to trust me (especially after my first failed attempt) and yet I was his best option. In turn, by teaching me a different way of seeing and navigating the world and helping me to pause and be more present for my surroundings, he was walking me home too.
Each of us had bits of the necessary information – one with sight and one with memory, intuition and prior knowledge – and together we stumbled our way toward home. When I started out with arrogance and too much confidence, sure I could find the way because I had sight, we ended up more lost than where we started. Together we had to stop on the street, sink into our shared lostness, and slowly build a map from our shared abilities.
This is the way of community and interdependence. Especially when the landscape changes and our navigational skills have not yet adapted to a new way of traveling, we need to reach out and find people who can help us in the fumbling. Those people may be just as lost as we are, but when we pool our resources, together we’ll find home.
****
This idea of finding home seems to have infiltrated my subconscious, because last night’s convoluted dreams were all about finding home. For the first part of the dream, I was suddenly homeless and had to find a place to live. I visited several apartments, hoping to find one that suited my needs. Later, in what seemed like a separate dream, I was living temporarily with someone else in a huge home with many rooms, none of which seemed to be mine. When I came down to dinner, there were two tables set – one was for me and my host and another was for any homeless people who happened to wander in off the street. I was about to eat at the table set for the homeless, but then my host said there was a place for me at her table. She was offering me a little bit of home in the midst of my homeless state.
As we near the end of 2016, a year in which the political landscape suddenly shifted dramatically, I sense that there are many people in the world who feel like that blind man, disoriented and fearful in a world they no longer now how to navigate. Collectively, we’re tapping our canes against walls, feeling the edges of the snowdrifts, trying to figure out why home suddenly feels so foreign and far away.
There are people out here on the street with us, but they’re just as lost as we are and we’re not sure we can trust them. What if they take us down the wrong road and we end up even more lost than when we started?
We who are lost need to find each other. We need to cling to each other in our lostness, pool our resources and our information, and stumble our way down unfamiliar streets together. Somehow, we’ll find our way back home.
*****
Are you fumbling your way into 2017, feeling like you’ve lost your navigational tools? Here are a few resources that might help.
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by Heather Plett | Dec 28, 2016 | connection, grief, growth, holding space, journey, Labyrinth
Sometimes grief comes like a runaway truck. You can see it careening down the highway toward you, but you don’t have enough time to get out of the way before it flattens you.
Sometimes it’s a slow moving train, and you’re stuck at the crossing, impatiently waiting for it to pass so that you can get on with your life.
Sometimes grief is a stealth bomber, dropping missiles from the sky and leaving you with an unfamiliar and sinister landscape that you don’t know how to navigate.
This Christmas, grief came to me like a sailboat – not disruptive or forceful, but with a strong enough wake to rearrange the pebbles on the shore.
It came in the dark while I was driving down the highway, on the way home from a full day of Christmas merriment at my brother’s house. It came on the same road where, six years earlier, I told my husband that, unless something changed, I couldn’t stay in the marriage any longer. It came while my daughters were peacefully sleeping in the van behind me. I was glad for the cover of darkness to hide the tears streaming down my face.
There is a unique grief that becomes part of your narrative when you’ve lost both parents and the partner you thought you’d spend the rest of your life with. It feels untethered – like there is nobody holding you to the ground anymore and you have to figure out how to do your own holding. It comes with a unique loneliness – a feeling of separateness – when you’ve lost those relationships at the first level of intimacy and the best that you now have is second-level intimacy. Those people care that you’re there and they love you dearly, but their eyes won’t light up when you walk into the room, and their hand won’t reach out to touch yours in a way that says either “you are my child” or “you are my beloved”.
I’d just spent the day with the people I adore (my siblings and their families), and my van was full of three girls whose love lights up my life, and yet I felt an undeniable sense of loneliness.
It was not unhealthy, this loneliness, nor was it even particularly painful. When it came, I felt no desire to banish it or even to resolve it in any hurry. There is no gaping hole in the centre of my heart; there is only a gentle gap that offers possibility for more fullness in the future.
I simply felt the longing in the loneliness and let it keep me company as I drove.
Longing is not something to be banished or feared. Longing is a friend, a messenger that points us in the direction of our hearts. Like a treasure map, it gives us clues that help us figure out where to dig.
Longing is what helps us make connections – with ourselves, with each other, with the sacred, and with the earth. We are meant for connection, to be in relationships that help us thrive and grow. If we didn’t ever feel longing, we would never seek each other out. We would live in isolation, never building communities, never taking the kinds of risks that result in intimacy, passion and aliveness.
Longing and love go hand in hand. Love grows in the world when we respond to our longing and reach out in connection and community.
My longing pointed me toward intimacy, touch, and deep soul connection.
There are many beautiful connections in my life, and for that I am grateful. But there’s a level of intimacy – both physical and emotional – that’s missing, and that is what my longing asks me to open my heart to.
There are other clues on this treasure map as well – clues that tell me that, in order to find the treasure of intimacy, more excavation will be required. I will need to continue to clear out the emotional clutter – old stories and attachments – that don’t serve me anymore. I will need to continue to heal the wounded parts of me that fear the deep vulnerability that comes with intimacy. I will need to soften the parts of me that keep me guarded and protected.
This past year has included a lot of excavation, a lot of decluttering, and a lot of dismantling of old stories. Now, at the end of it, I feel ready to sit with the empty spaces in my heart – the longing and hunger that comes when the old has been removed and the new has not yet come to fill its place. I feel ready to sit at the centre of the labyrinth – emptied of what I needed to release on the journey inward and ready to receive what has yet to arrive.
With this writing, I am suddenly aware of what my word for 2017 will be. My longing pointed the way to it.
My word for 2017 is intimacy.
What about you? Do you feel a deep longing right now? An ache in your heart that won’t go away? If so, what is it trying to teach you, what connection is it telling you to seek out?
Don’t chase it away and don’t fear it. Let it enter you, let it teach you, and let it point you toward the treasure you have yet to uncover.
*****
If you’re interested in exploring your own longing and want to pick a word for 2017, A Soulful Year may be a useful resource.
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by Heather Plett | Dec 8, 2016 | Community, Uncategorized
Yesterday, for the first time in the twenty-five years since I owned my first vehicle, I figured out how to change a burnt out lightbulb on my van’s turn signal. After that, I changed the broken windshield wiper. And in both cases, I’d bought the right ones for my vehicle and didn’t have to go back to the store to exchange them. Score!
When I finished, I wanted someone to celebrate with me, so I told my daughters. They have no clue what it feels like to be newly single at fifty and in charge of all of the little details of solo home/vehicle ownership and were suitably unimpressed. So I told my friends on Facebook and some of them understood and gave me virtual high fives.
There have been a lot of those small victories lately as I navigate this new terrain. I installed a set of closet doors earlier this week. And last week I built a small table, a large tray, and some shelves out of wood. A few months before that, I tore most of the flooring out of my house and learned to use a circular saw. All by myself! Huzzah!
These were all firsts for me. Nearly every time I’ve accomplished something new, I’ve looked for someone to celebrate with me. Sometimes I’ve texted friends, I’ve shared it on social media, or I’ve even found ways of bringing it up with strangers in the hardware store.
This may sound insecure – like I need someone’s validation to make me feel better about myself, but I don’t see it that way. Frankly, I felt great about what I’d accomplished even before anyone offered a response, so I didn’t need it, but I wanted it. Because celebration is better done in community.
It was celebration I was looking for – not validation.
Celebration is different from validation. Celebration elevates and encourages me, while validation encourages dependency. Celebration lets me know I’m not alone, while validation makes me feel like I can’t handle doing things on my own. If I need validation, it implies that I don’t know how to find my value without it. If, instead, I’m seeking celebration, it means that I want to be witnessed by my people because I honour the role they play in helping me to be courageous and strong.
Of course, there is a fine line between asking for attention/validation or showing off, and I don’t always know where that line is. And sometimes, when I’m feeling insecure, I step over that line. Plus each of us interprets it differently, based on our own set of internalized stories, so when I think it’s celebration I’m looking for, you might see it as validation.
Several months ago, after I’d given a keynote address to my largest audience ever, I shared my excitement on social media, and someone sent me a private message admonishing me for bragging too much. I felt hurt and I second-guessed myself. Was I bragging too much? Should I take the post down and celebrate my accomplishment all alone in my hotel room? No, I decided to leave it where it was and to allow those who wanted to give me a “woohoo!” to join in the celebration. This was my community, after all, and I need them in times of celebration just as I need them in times of struggle.
We get mixed up sometimes. We have a great fear of bragging and being “too big for our britches”, and so we keep our little victories to ourselves rather than inviting our dear ones into the celebration with us. And we let our fear spread to other people – we shame them for bragging so that they too will stay small and out of sight.
Living in an era of self-sufficiency and independence, we have become conditioned to fend for ourselves and act like we don’t need anyone.We’re not “supposed” to ask for too much support. We’re “supposed” to be able to accomplish great things without any support. We’re “supposed” to be self-confident enough to live out our dreams with nobody cheering us on.
I hear these words come out of my clients’ mouths sometimes. It’s not unusual for them to be a little embarrassed to speak of their accomplishments and their dreams. They talk about how they should be more self-confident and self-sufficient and should have the courage to do great things without other people’s support. Underneath, though, these is almost always a longing for the kind of community connections that will give them support and encouragement.
The self-help/coaching world has contributed to this individualistic mindset. We talk about “standing in our own power” but we don’t often talk about “standing in the power that is strengthened by community”. We talk about “creating our own destiny” and “detaching from other people’s opinion of us” but we don’t often talk about how our identity is intertwined with the people we’re in relationship with.
Self-sufficiency is a flawed ideal. We’re not really meant to be doing any of these things alone. We’re meant to live in community and to reach for each other in times of both celebration and grief. Because we are stronger and more courageous when we are together. We are more capable of personal growth and healing when we are in healthy relationships.
We NEED to need each other. We need community celebrations. We need to share our victories. We need to lend each other courage. We need to rely on each other’s strength.
Don’t get me wrong – I have great admiration for people who have the courage to do unpopular things because they believe in them even when nobody is on the sidelines cheering. AND I believe that we often let ourselves down when we don’t dare take a step before it is affirmed by others.
AND I also believe that when we do courageous or hard things, or even simple little things that make us feel good about ourselves, we’re meant to share our victories and allow others to celebrate with us.
Because when we celebrate together, the courage grows and spreads and the celebration galvanizes us to take even more bold steps.
So go ahead, let someone know the next time you do something you didn’t think you were capable of. Share your accomplishments and even your minor victories. Don’t attach your identity or value to whether or not they respond favourably (they’ve got their own stories going on, after all), but enjoy the celebration when they show up to support you.
And when you see others do the same, don’t shame them for bragging – put down your own baggage and celebrate with them!
