The Future, Unrestrained

In your life...

You’ve been inspired and you’ve been encouraged. You’ve felt the space someone opened up in front of you to give you room to stretch, to breathe, to relax, and to create.

You’ve been discouraged, exhausted, overwhelmed, and afraid. You’ve felt the pressure of others trying to get you to conform, to do it their way, to live by their expectations and rules for your life.

Despite however your days go, you are likely less bounded than you think, more expansive than you’ve seen, and more clear, wise, and insightful than you know.

You’re human, and there’s a depth of experience, love, and insight available that you never knew was there.

This post is about you and it’s about me. It’s about every other adult we know. It's also about everyone who comes after us. We adults are the lids on what’s possible for the future - so long as we’re limited in our ability to thrive in the face of all circumstances, we remain the limit on future generations.

It’s time to let loose the restraints. It’s time to be intentional. It’s time to step into creative action. It’s time to live in our full power as agents of love, compassion, ease, enjoyment, understanding, and fulfillment. It’s time to be authentically and generously expressed. And it’s time to bring consistency to all of that.

I mean, why not? We're used to the alternative, and it might just be kinda fun.

I'm full of gratitude for your generous gift of time and engagement. Thank you. ❤️

Slipping on the Faculty Room Floor

A handful of years back, I stepped into the faculty room kitchen to put my lunch in the fridge. One foot onto the tile and I slipped and fell flat on my back.

After fearfully looking around to see if anyone saw me fall (funny how this was my first concern 🤦‍♂️), I then got up to check out the reason I fell. There was a puddle made of water and coffee at the entrance to the room that someone before me didn’t clean up. So I enjoyed a few moments of anger and frustration.

Then I took a breath, shrugged, and cleaned up the mess.

If the person who made the mess had noticed and cleaned it up, I wouldn’t have slipped. But they didn’t. And of course I would’ve been justified if I didn’t clean it up - I didn’t even make the mess!

Regardless of what came before, now that I had cleaned it up, people after me wouldn’t slip.

That’s what being an adult makes possible - being responsible both for our experience and for leaving the world better off.

Being responsible not as an obligation, but as an opportunity.

An opportunity to mend, to heal, to fix, and to give. An opportunity to feel, to enjoy, to consider, and to grow.

An opportunity to use our broadened perspectives, our facility with language, our capacity for compassion and generosity and forgiveness.

An opportunity to love unconditionally.

The radical responsibility available to adults can certainly be viewed as a burden - that’s why we often expend so much energy blaming others and justifying it.

But radical responsibility can also be seen as an opportunity - an opportunity to experience well-being and to be agents in fostering the well-being of others.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

“You are not responsible for the programming you picked up in childhood. However, as an adult, you are 100% responsible for fixing it.” - Ken Keyes

Hiding My Vulnerabilities

During lunch with colleagues last week, I self-righteously shared an “I told them so!” about my last job. "See! They were blind all along!"

And I didn’t feel good afterward - something was off, and I felt shame rise up.

So I went next door to speak with a colleague about it. I knew I was covering something up with that self-righteousness, and I knew the truth would come out if I started to own it with someone else.

I use self-righteousness to hide vulnerability. With just a few of my former colleagues, I didn’t feel heard, respected, or trusted. Some part of me did and still does wonder what’s wrong with me that I wasn’t seen in a positive light, and I still fear that my experience with them was because I’m just “not enough” as a person.

And I really want that to be their fault and not mine, so I get loud and self-righteous!

It’s a really good thing that we try to hide our vulnerabilities! Doing so has been a crucial part of our survival over the millennia. The problem, though, is that covering it up doesn’t make it go away, it just hides it - the vulnerability is still there, and I’m not as free when my actions and being are stuck trying to cover it up.

So it’s really fine to want to cover that vulnerability up, it's just not usually necessary. In fact, my relationships deepen when I'm willing to share those vulnerabilities.

I now know that whenever I’m feeling self-righteous about my old job, that vulnerability (“Maybe I’m just not good enough?”) is right there behind it.

For me:

• self-righteousness has underlying insecurity and fear

• anger has underlying insecurity and fear

• anxiety has underlying insecurity and fear

• arrogance has underlying insecurity and fear

• embarrassment has underlying insecurity and fear

• addictive behavior has underlying insecurity and fear

Knowing this doesn't mean that those emotions are bad or wrong, but it does encourage me to consider where my actions and being are coming from. The insecurity and fear are nearly always phantoms, and there's usually nothing to actually be afraid of.

You know what doesn’t have underlying insecurity and fear?

• Compassion

• Presence of mind

• Intentionality

• Relaxed well-being

• Creativity

• Love

Maybe this is hyperbole, but I think that what underlies all of our selfish and negative emotions is a desire to be safe, heard, acknowledged, appreciated, and loved. And perhaps we’re scared that we’re just not worthy of any of that.

This is true for me at least.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️