I have to admit, that I never quite know what it means when something is described as a doozy. Or rather, I know it involves exceptionality or uniqueness, but I am not always certain whether a doozy is a good thing (like a gymnast landing) or a bad thing (like deconstructed macaroni and cheese, not to be spoken about ever again).
April 2020 has been a doozy thus far. The one things that works well for all varieties of doozies is receiving life’s exceptions and uniquenesses in a calm state. Calm, as defined by Brené Brown, consists of three essential behaviours: the ability to maintain perspective, to act mindfully and to manage our emotional reactivity. Calm is often the first to exit when we are stymied by events.
How do we maintain calm, when our doozometer registers a mac-and-cheese incident?
The first uncomfortable truth is to recognise that you have more than one self. You have your rational self, your emotional self, and most of us have a very feisty two year old in there somewhere too. Our rational mind will lead us to what makes the most sense, the most reasonable to minimize the disruption. It uses knowledge, logic, past experiences, research and planning. It is a great tool for focus. Unfortunately it is also a big con artist. Our feeling mind recruits emotions to inform decisions, it is reactive, inconvenient, but also a truth teller: it is the barometer of how we really are. Over-identification with either leads to problems in both our work-life and personal life. Anyone ever heard loving, exasperated phrases hurled at them such as stop being so emotional, or stop hiding behind logic? Just me then. Moving on. We all have a particular bent towards one or the other, especially in times of uncertainty and stress. We have to get comfortable with taking a good hard look in the mirror and boldly declaring: “I am calming my selves down".
As you may expect, there is a middle ground, called the wise mind, which allows sense-making and emotion to play well together. It is intuitive, and mindful and allows multiple perspectives; the wise mind is the birthplace of calm.
To allow the wise mind to show up consistently, we are required to clear the next, and what I consider the most treacherous hurdle: our preoccupation with the concept of balance: work/life balance, a balanced diet. How do you balance what makes the most sense with what feels better? The second uncomfortable truth is that we don’t. We can’t. Balance in this sense would be like holding the longest plank in history: uncomfortable, shaky, leaving us off-balance (!) and unable to focus on or feel much else.
Rather, try harmony: give a little, take a little, a little more to the left, a little to the right, guided by your own intuition and the helpful feedback of your family members and pets. Harmony is dynamic, balance is static; harmony is a dance, not a plank! And oh, the dance moves gets smoother with practice.
Only this week, my wise mind freed me from a restrictive thinking pattern. For years, I was guided by the wonderful words of John Steinbeck when he said: Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good. I used to love that quote! But it no longer resonates in quite the same way. I no longer believe that wisdom is discovered in being good, or acting balanced. We recover and discover more resilience and flexibility when we own and respect all of our bits, even the scrappy 2 year old who doesn't want to go to bed. Intuition tells me that perhaps for the foreseeable future, this may be more befitting of the doozy: Now that we don’t have to be good, we can be perfectly ourselves.
Do you have some doozy-harmony-moves to bust out? If you do, I have added just the tune: https://youtu.be/7DM8A88L5AI
Keep dancing,
Dunay
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