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Posts tagged ‘Life journeys’

Apr 1

Legacies

The past few weeks have been centered on what I want to both leave behind and create as the leader of a small church group. My thoughts have taken me to the legacies we each receive and leave as we journey in life.

Over the years I had not given it much thought because I have no biological children, and aren’t legacies what you leave for them? I will leave this world as I came into it: unconnected. Maybe that is not an accurate way of looking at it. We can build deep connections during our lives. We may or may not exit with deep connections. It’s up to us to build connections, and to pass them on: legacies.

I suppose this is why we focus on leaving something behind, so that we can mark our connection to the world we’ve lived in. My thinking about all of this changed about seven years ago. Now I am preparing for a new life journey that is opening up, and once again asking myself what I’ll be leaving behind. It is causing me to explore new possibilities, and to think along new lines.

As I look back on others who have left their mark on this planet, I think of my parents. They touched many lives, and they never gloated about it. It was always done in a manner of simple quietness and generosity. I will never know how far their lives reached into others’ lives. That is a good thing, and it has served as an example to me: do it quietly and leave no trace.

I think of others who have touched my life, and it seems to always play out in the same manner. It is a quiet sense of doing something behind closed doors and out of the public eye. I owe these men and women so much.

Legacies can serve as gifts or not-so-pleasant packages of regret. I hope that what I leave will be the gift package wrapped up in a pretty, fluffy bow.

How does one leave a legacy? I think by doing the best they can. And in many situations, it turns out to be a neutral desire to do good in the world. Parents raise children who step out into the world and contribute in unforeseen ways. I’d venture a guess that most Nobel Peace Prize winners didn’t set the goal to win that prize: their work won it for them. At some point in a person’s life, the work that they are doing becomes bigger than they are. Mother Teresa is such a person. A lesser-known Nobel laureate is John Nash. His life was portrayed in the film A Beautiful Mind, and his greatest work was in mental health. That was not his area of expertise.

One legacy I cherish is the legacy of music my parents created in their family. My parents had decided before marriage that music would be a primary happening in our home. My father was a pianist, and my mother sang. We all sang. We each did other musical things as well. Of all the legacies left to me, music is the one that has affected me the most. Singing and the sounds of music have shaped my life. Even my wedding reception ended with music, and I found myself singing without a care on a cozy December evening in 1998. Music was just what my family did.

I’ve written about the different paths we travel in our life journeys. Each journey unfolds to teach us new thoughts about ourselves and our greater lives. I don’t know where I’m headed on this new path—I do know it will be a good place, and I’ll do my best to make it count. I understand that I needed to heal, and to leave the battlement to get to where I’m headed. The courage to heal came from my listening to my body, my heart, and my head. I followed that path of knowledge and now stand with a new path facing me. Where will I go? 

Jun 21

Running Scripts

Long, long ago, in a time decades in the past, there was a younger Gail in her early twenties. At the end of my first two years of schooling, and with an Associate of Arts Degree in hand, I discovered my life to be a mess. One of my professors suggested psychotherapy. Scared of what was ahead of me, I trusted the insight of a woman who saw what I couldn’t see in myself. 

When I stumbled into psychotherapy, I’d just escaped from the clutches of two years in a conservative college town that was not the normal California that I had been raised in. Having returned to the sanity of California, and desiring to get free of where I’d been, I found a therapist.   

At first there was deconstruction. Deconstruction is the dismantling of who we think we are, only to discover that our beliefs about ourselves need to be challenged and examined thoroughly. Deconstruction for me took years, and several therapists. I was peeling the layers of the onion of myself; this takes time. The “it took years” can be explained by the fact that I also took breaks in the process to synthesize the movement that was occurring in my life. I needed different therapists for different portions of the road. Some were better fits than others. During my grad school years, the work took on the focus of resolving unresolved issues that would enable me to become clear headed about myself, and with my clients. Ultimately, what it all taught me was that I’d be monitoring my stuff for the rest of my life. I needed to be doing my own work with an objective party who was willing to call me on my stuff. 

On the practical side, what I’ve learned from my time spent in therapy is that I’m a person who might need to step back for a few hours or a few days to sense what is really going on deep down in the soup of my head. When we listen to ourselves, we need to, and must, employ the same reflective listening that we do when in conversation with others. Do we allow ourselves to do this listening, or are we quick with a response to ourselves?  

One “rubber-meets-the-road” skill that we need to use on ourselves is the pause, and then count to 100. When we’re ready to rip someone’s face off, this serves as a means to get calm, think it through, and most likely come back with a kinder response than the angry thing we were going to allow out of our mouths. How many times has pausing saved you? What if we practice this pause with ourselves? 

What if the next time you were tempted to spew a list of all the reasons “I’m an idiot” for doing or saying whatever you just did or said, you counted to 100, took time to think about what you were about to do, and asked yourself the WHY question? What happens when you call yourself on your own self-talk and the scripts you run in a way that challenges all of it, the scripts and the motives for running the scripts? 

There’s a huge difference between running self-destructive scripts and deeply questioning our motives for running the scripts. The former allows us to remain in the same place and feeds the illusion that by running the script we’re doing something constructive about our behavior. The latter moves us into a place of personal responsibility for our thoughts and actions and requires us to ask the “What can I do about this?” question. It requires movement, research, and further exploration that could lead us towards the therapy we need to work on situations we find ourselves in.

Next week in part two we’ll explore the subject of selecting a therapist. See you then.