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Human beings are incredible and resilient. We are adaptive. We persist. There are so many amazing stories about people who persevere through challenging circumstances, ultimately succeeding, often against all odds. These stories are captivating and inspiring. Like Daniel Kish, the blind man who developed a kind of vision that has nothing to do with his eyes which allows him to navigate the world independently and successfully. Or Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. These stories are truly incredible, and they offer us more than just inspiration. They also offer an opportunity to overcome something within ourselves if we're willing to confront it. For Daniel Kish, the absence of people in his life treating him like he couldn't allowed him the freedom and space to try things and fail enough to figure out whether he could. His story offers each of us the opportunity to examine our pre-conceived notions about who is able and identify how those beliefs seep into our actions and shape the world around us. For Elizabeth Blackwell it was incredibly difficult to accomplish what she did in both academia and her subsequent medical practice. A whole lot of people tried quite actively to prevent any of it from happening. And yet she made it. She even created a place for other women to learn medicine and cultivated opportunities for those graduates to also do their residencies. Her story offers us all the opportunity to reflect on our modern health care and education systems, to sniff-out where commonly held beliefs about certain kinds of people are resulting in the same kind of exclusion today, and to figure out what we can do differently in our lives to make space for others to succeed. Mental toughness is a common theme in these and many other perseverance stories. Grit is certainly one of the ingredients in my personal and professional successes. And here is where I'd like us to just pause for a moment and consider where all that mental toughness comes from. Mine is born of tough circumstances. Of course that isn't true for everyone; it is prefect possible to develop mental toughness through practice that isn't also traumatizing. But for me, there were periods of my life I couldn’t escape from, and I either had to give up and stop living or grit my teeth and get through it. Like a lot of people faced with similar circumstances, I survived. And in so doing I developed the skill of surviving shitty circumstances while maintaining the outward appearance of having my shit pretty well together. I do not enjoy that I had to learn how to keep it together during extremely tough times. I don't wish that experience on anyone. And I am also grateful for the skillset of not-completely-falling-apart-in-crisis. It's been quite helpful in dealing with my present post-covid situation. I’m in an interesting place because I spent the earlier part of this year in the process of deconstructing all my long-standing coping strategies and personal survival protocols. Then Covid came along and has changed my brain and body in such a significant way that I have now also been forced into deconstructing my schedule and all my hobbies and social activities and rebuilding the very structure of my entire life. It's quite a challenging process and also a very emotional one. Between personal self-work, emotional regulation, body discomfort and healing, I don't have much juice left in the tank for anything else. Even thought it sucks, I'm going to make it through just fine. Due in part to my mental toughness and in part to the access I have to the incalculably valuable resource of community support. Lingering Covid effects are one of those challenging circumstances that aren't currently preventable. But my perseverance story shouldn't be discounted as having no other lessons to teach us. If we had a better health care system and a real social safety net, I could take the time I need to focus all my energy and effort on healing. As it stands now, I've still got to get all my work done so my family can continue to survive capitalism. Of course surviving capitalism isn't easy for anyone, and it's especially challenging for anyone who didn't start out with access to a pile of money. The people who eventually discovered the MRNA vaccine were initially discounted by the rest of the medical science community. That means they didn't have access to as many grants or other resources necessary to perform their work. But they stuck it out and continued their efforts, eventually making it possible for a covid vaccine to be created in record time. At which point, we all celebrated their achievement and praised their determination. Why do we continue to venerate that aspect of these tales? I think we offer extra praise points for extra suffering to avoid doing the hard work of actually fixing the things that make it so dreadfully difficult to succeed if you're not already successful. Changing the system to ensure future scientists have access to adequate resources sounds like far better thanks than some kudos for discovering a wonderful thing in spite of all the societally-erected barriers. What if these eventual Nobel Prize recipients had support from the beginning? How much less suffering could they have gone through and how much sooner could society have enjoyed the amazing finds they discovered? I feel the same way about almost every story I hear about an oppressed person rising above their oppression to open doors other people get to walk through just for existing. I recently read about Allyson Felix, a many-medaled Olympian. When she became pregnant, Nike drastically cut her endorsement. So she created her own brand of running shoes, overcame adversity, and went on to win more medals. All of which she could have accomplished without persecution. These survival and perseverance stories each have a double lesson available for the taking. One thing I'd like us to take away from all of them is: it doesn't actually have to be so damn difficult. The people who persist and resist and break through barriers definitely deserve appreciation, acknowledgement, and accolades. And also, can we please stop making some people's lives so fucking hard? Imagine the possibilities if all these amazing people could focus their grit and their determination and their creativity on just the thing they're trying to accomplish and not also on surviving the process. Information and Inspiration
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Tragedy is part of the human experience. We have all experienced a personal tragedy, a community tragedy, a national tragedy, or a global tragedy at some point. Sometimes all at once. They can be caused by natural disasters or take the form of human constructions (sometimes both). The tragedy of October 7th that sparked the current Israel-Hamas war is entirely human in its creation. And while the event itself was horrifying at the time for the people who lived through it, the aftermath has been horrifying to me. There's a particular flavor in the way that attack on that date is being discussed by some media outlets and many Israeli mouthpieces which is both incomplete and dangerous. To hear some folks explain it, the events of October the 7th were a completely isolated incident that came out of nowhere. As if nothing came before which might have contributed to its occurrence. It is also the same way the news frames almost any riot or violent protest demanding police accountability or human rights: completely without regard for any of the tragedy that came before. It feels especially important to discuss this framing phenomenon during this week because it is Feast Week in the US. The official name for this holiday is Thanksgiving and it's origins have been used as a mechanism to whitewash the American genocide of native people. The context-free discussions about the October 7th violence are identical to the way some sections of US American Indian history is told. There are plaques around the country commemorating the deaths of white American settlers at the hands of vicious Indians. Never mind these incidents happened after and in response to brutality and settlers forcibly confiscating and setting on native land. I have re-shaped my November harvest feast holiday to include truth, acknowledgement, and activism. That's not the prevailing practice, so I put in deliberate effort to choose a different kind of participation. I had to acknowledge the complete horrifying history to fully see the through-line in today's societal systems which continue to cover up what really happened. It's not in the interests of capitalism or the status quo for people to opt-out of the chummy, white savior first thanksgiving narrative. But it is necessary for healing. My own healing, community healing, and healing the world. Another opportunity for reflection this week was Monday's Trans Day of Remembrance. Losing a friend or loved one or community member is always sad. Losing someone you care about because they couldn't find a way to keep on living or because someone else didn't want them to exist is nothing short of tragic. A lot of things coalesce to create these tragedies. They are not isolated incidents. It's critical to look beyond the incident itself and identify its roots. That's the only way we can hope to create change. So as you roast your turkey and mash your potatoes, or while you ignore the holiday and do literally anything else with your Thursday, please take a moment to consider everything that lead up to this moment in time. Remember it is possible to both recognize your own pain as well as the acknowledge the suffering of others. Figure out how to cultivate empathy and understanding for oppressed people lashing-out instead of judgement or reproach for desperate people employing desperate measures. Learn about the suffering other people experience. Read a book, watch a documentary, talk to a friend. Then decide how to live differently now that you know what's still going on for someone else. Information and Inspiration
I found myself incredibly busy over the summer. Not regular getting out in the nice weather while we have it busy, but extremely and unrelentingly doing ALL THE THINGS busy. Every moment on my calendar was full and every time slot assigned. I went on work trips, I went on vacation, I visited family, I went camping with friends, I helped family navigate illness and treatment, I played in sports tournaments, I attended memorials. All while maintaining my regular workload and teaching at the dojo when I was in town. I'm lucky my work is portable enough I can do it from almost anywhere. I enjoyed all the things I did and the places I went, but the immense volume of coming and going was decidedly not enjoyable. It was out of control. Once I finally stopped moving, I could reflecting on all that action. I realized I have had a long-standing practice of doing only the activities or projects I could justify as necessary or important. I can't just go putter around my garden because I enjoy it; I have to make time for weeding the garden because the garden needs to be weeded. Weeding is sufficiently important and therefore spending time in the garden is authorized. Recently I have been working quite diligently to liberate myself from productivity based value and other societal bullshit I picked up by living and working in our modern world. All the while laboring under the unfortunate falsehood that I still had to justify everything I was doing. That belief was so deep I couldn't see it lurking under the surface and soaking into everything else I was thinking and doing. No wonder I couldn't imagine a way to function in the world other than the self control and containment strategies I've been employing for decades. I'm glad I finally could see it, even if it took overdoing it for almost this entire year to finally be able to look at it. It was a painful realization and I tried to go easy on myself for having bought into the lie for so long. We collect the baggage we accumulate because it helps us survive. However uncomfortable the process of unearthing and examining it, I had to see the narrative running in the background before I could choose something different. And I needed to select a new base program to move forward and build the life I want Future Me to live in. And now my entire existence has been reshaped by the after-effects of Covid. I can’t participate in many of my regular activities because my body physically can't do them. For the first few weeks, I just didn't do those things. Like I was on vacation from regular life and would be returning at any moment. I haven't wanted to replace those hobbies, outlets, and events with new things because I want to feel like I will get to go back to my regularly scheduled programming at some point. But while that helped me maintain a certain volume of hope for a full recovery, it is also another kind of idling. It allowed me to temporarily avoid processing all my disappointment in my current circumstance as well as my feelings of inadequacy and incompleteness. Being physically strong and agile is an enormous slice of my personality pie. Suddenly loosing that capability has been devastating, and finding new outlets for my need to move my body and sweat has been a challenge. I feel like a completely differently shaped person. I'm ready to find out just how many amazing things this new body can do, I just need a little time to settle in and understand who is this new me. Information and Inspiration
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AuthorJaydra is a human in-process, working to make the world a better place. Sharing thoughts, feelings, and observations about the human experience. Archives
March 2024
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