One of the ways I love myself is to resist the narrative that my significance and contribution to the world around me are directly correlated to my productivity and achievements. Even though I’d consider myself someone with a large capacity to produce and a desire to achieve, it has taken a great deal of work to see that my value to my family, friends, co-workers, and community is not what I can do for them.
Yesterday, my daughter toddled down the hallway, grabbed my hand, and said, “Color, mama? Sit here?” We pulled out her chair, crayons, and printer paper and sat in the sun to draw. She’d taken off her headband, so I decided to draw it while she practiced “Circles and haaaarrts.”
In his book, Domestic Monastery, Ronald Rolheiser writes about St. Bernard, one of the architects of monasticism. The monastic bell rang throughout the day, and no matter what monks were doing, they’d stop immediately and respond to the bell as a reminder that time isn’t yours; it’s God’s. Rolheiser compares this to mothers or fathers raising their children repeatedly hearing the “monastic bell.” Time is not our own, and part of keeping our commitments requires us to be interrupted, to stop mid-sentence or mid-stream, and to tend to the task at hand.
This is true with or without small hands and feet and snack requests destroying your creative flow. Rolheiser writes:
Stay inside your commitments, be faithful, your place of work is a seminary, your work is a sacrament, your family is a monastery, your home is a sanctuary. Stay inside them, don’t betray them, learn what they are teaching you without constantly looking for life elsewhere and without constantly believing God is elsewhere.
Aside from responding to interruption without irritability, I love the feeling of a pen in my hand scratching across paper. Writing by hand improves memory retention, encourages deep thinking, and stimulates our creative brain. Often during my workday or writing time, I’ll switch to writing by hand when I hit a wall or need to untangle a knot in my brain.
Coloring with Willow reminded me of one of my guiding principles:
Stay bad at something. The pressure to achieve mastery at literally everything we do is asinine. Resist the need to be good and pleasing and accommodating all the time.
In our culture, we skew toward perfection or failure instead of wholeness and learning. Say the right thing. Do the right thing. Be the right thing. When we’re kids, teachers tell us to color inside the lines and that if we fill in a horse, he can never be purple, or striped, or polka-dotted. The “right way” ethos of school sits in the formation of my brain, and I’m watching my children yearn for the affirmation that their creative instincts are okay. Yes, paint the sky red, color the dinosaur pink, give the man black skin and purple hair. It’s all okay. We are not supposed to be the same.
I will not color inside the lines. I will be good to myself and others, but I will not conform. Failure is part of the process, and I am a student of life. I am learning.
Because I’m so bad at art, it helps me resist the “good girl” narrative and gives me the freedom to be bad at something. It doesn’t matter how often I draw; I’ve never developed a knack for it, but drawing is fun, soothing, and similar to writing, pulling me into a meditative world of creation.
I hope more of us choose to embrace the messy newness of unformed ideas and relationships.
Everything starts as an unformed idea. I write and often speak about the process of being because we’re under the wrong impression that success (whatever that means to you) is a straight line. Climb the ladder! One rung after another, increasing your growth, capacity, and skillset! If you work hard enough, you’ll reach the top!
But no one talks about how many times we fall off the ladder, how some all-star will step on your head to get higher, or how a person you trust will kick the ladder from underneath you. No one tells you how you’ll have to start at the first rung again and again and again, so we just keep saying, if I just try harder, work harder, I’ll get there.
Bootstraps are bull crap, and as someone who dug her way out of poverty and addiction, I can tell you that reaching for some imaginary life of “success” didn’t help me do that. Imagining that my best life was somewhere “out there” kept me in a hellish rat race, trying to perform my way into love and freedom. It was resisting the idea that I needed to “be someone,” “do something great,” or “do all the right things” to be loved or valuable to the world around me that empowered me to put one foot in front of the other and be present in my own life. Presence is powerful and who we are becoming is more important than what we are achieving.
What is everyone reaching for anyway? Aren’t you tired of reaching and striving and, in all that effort, still not feeling fulfilled? What if the people you want to impress will never be impressed by you?
As they say, the math ain’t mathing. Part of the reason I love the mystics and writers like Rolheiser, and communities in recovery, is because the focus is on being and not doing. I like the integrity I gain when I say yes to my life. Accepting my interrupting babies and the limitations in my body, enjoying my work and making it meaningful, trusting that where I am right now is exactly where my best life is… that feels true to me; it feels like recovery to me. So here’s my reminder this week from a time-out coloring with Willow Bug:
You are not an object or a product.
You are dearly loved by God and worthy of love from a community of people who expects integrity, not perfection. We all need to grow, but folks who are never satisfied with you are dissatisfied with themselves, not you. Their standards of perfection don’t have to settle down on your shoulders. Don’t take it personal. Create. Resist.
Color outside the lines. Be a good human. Do your best work. Grow together and hold fast to love.
In love and solidarity,
Ash
So, so beautiful. Lucky Willow, that her mama gets it: "learn what they are teaching you without constantly looking for life elsewhere and without constantly believing God is elsewhere." Took me a loooong time to accept the truth of that, and I still forget. Thanks for the sweet, sweet reminder.
I love this! Growth is messy, and if we try to avoid that mess, we'll never grow.