These are tough times, and it doesn't look like the road ahead is easier. It's challenging to maintain a sense of balance when the ground beneath your feet feels like its changing.

How Your Adult Can Help Your Inner Child Become Resourceful Again (Inside Out, Part 2)

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you are managing in today’s world. You at least have access to a computer. You can probably drive a car or navigate the bus or metro system. You can buy groceries, probably cook at least a simple meal. Likely you have or have had a job or are in school. Possibly you have a partner, children or maybe elders you are responsible for, in addition to managing yourself. In short, you are an adult.

Don and I rarely have time to go to the movies, let alone a children’s movie. Last week we ventured into the theatre to see Disney and Pixar’s new film, Inside Out. In it, the film explores the roller coaster of emotions that the protagonist, an 11 year old girl named Riley, experiences when her parents uproot her from her secure home in Minnesota to move to San Francisco. Riley’s emotions, in the form of five characters – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust – control Riley’s behavior from her “head quarters”. As she navigates through her new world, the tensions and struggles these emotional “characters” encounter show us the basis for Riley’s behavior. The film is charming, fast-paced, and well written, and very useful in showing how little control we actually have over our somatic self.

I'm not on an actual roller coaster, looping through space like these two children, though that is a darned good metaphor for this past year. Hopefully after the ride these the children were greeted with warm hugs from a trusted caregiver and celebrated for a successful encounter with a scary experience. That warm reception after a fright will help them switch their bodily state from hyper-activation to an alert relaxed state that builds their confidence and willingness to face future challenges. I am recovering from a recent experience of creeping chronic fear, however, and here's what I learned.

I was frozen stiff yet I wasn’t even cold! Of course, I don’t mean literally freezing as in temperature. I mean that I recently found myself frozen and unable to move forward on an important project. (Which is why you didn’t get this newsletter sooner). Obviously, you’re getting this letter, so I’ve escaped the deep freeze. I’d like to share how I did it, so that if you find yourself in a similar situation, you can escape the freeze, too.

In the case of the infrastructure on our homestead, the primary system–the power grid–failed, taking with it water production, sewage processing, and heat. Then our back up system failed. Fortunately for us, after a few days of heating large stones with a propane torch to bring inside and help stabilize the house temperature, and draining what water we could from our pressure tanks into storage jugs, a kind friend loaned us a generator. Then the problem became finding propane to run it, because the storm in Texas shut down a third of the nation’s supply of these fuels, and every one else was cold, too. It was systems all the way down. We learned a lot from this stress-test of our infrastructure systems, and I wanted to share a few key take-aways for us.

"Killing babies, drinking blood, and occasionally eating fetuses is what middle-class English people do, or at least what some of them were described as doing during the 1980's–when not submitting their own children to bizarre forms of sexual abuse in the context of Satanic rituals. What started as a rumor became a public crisis, when more and more cases were reported ... Local authorities were flooded with anonymous accusations. ... After more careful police investigations, it turned out there was no evidence for any of those alleged episodes of abuse, Satanic or otherwise." Sound familiar? This quote was taken from Pascal Boyer's 2018 book, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

Christmas Day is significant for me for another reason. Last year, I was confronted with a potentially serious health diagnosis. The outcome of the tests was as yet unknown on that Christmas Day when I threw the I-Ching, the famous Chinese Book of Changes, to see if I could gain some insights into my situation. Those comments were powerful and still affecting me. This year, my health crisis is past, and yet we are still facing a world turned upside down. As I didn’t have time to throw the I-Ching on Christmas day, I decided I would see what insights I could glean from this film. Let me know what you think of these “lessons” I got from as I wondered about Wonder Woman 1984.

For many of us, the pandemic arrived in our lives with a crash, either jobs ending suddenly, school children home, illness or loss if someone you love was affected. For those in medical hot spots, overwhelm and exhaustion became your new normal. Now that it's clear we are running a marathon instead of a sprint, we can learn how to pace ourselves, to rest whenever an opportunity presents itself. Invest in good shoes.

Unlike the liminal zone that I wrote about in my last post, where the future is uncertain, unknown, and emergent, transition implies that you are moving from one place to another. That is, that you have a defined objective or goal that you are moving towards. Right now the USA is in a wrenching transition at its highest level of government, for good or ill depending on your politics. My intention in this email is not to take sides, but rather to explore how transitions work and serve us, and how we so often find our selves, “lost in transition” (if you’ll pardon the play on words from the book and movie, “Lost in Translation.)

Liminal refers to that space between, not one thing, nor quite the other, determinedly neither. This word comes to mind often these days. One of the interesting aspects of experiencing so much disruption in our lives, is that the sense of uncertainty does not stay neatly quarantined in the areas such as work or school that are actually disrupted. It is as if we experience life as more fluid, less firmly fixed around the edges, rather like a liquid that could bleed through the borders and edges we define for it.

What does a Korean Netflix series have to do with family constellations? A lot it turns out. The whole show is about either generational family dynamics gone awry or the consequences of our actions on other people (and on our potential next incarnation!) All this is mixed with comedy, a supernatural flare, and consequences in the After Life. Like a family constellation workshop, the show revels humorously in the foibles of the human condition, dips into moments of great pathos, unveils longing disguised as anger (secondary emotions!), and reveals the power of enduring love.

This is the first time our modern world has experienced a global threat (not of our own making like war, that is.) It’s normal to experience fear in the face of such uncertainty and changes in the rhythms of daily life. The human brain is able to hold only a small amount of information in conscious attention which is designed to pay attention to the world on a need-to-know-basis, and that assumes tomorrow will look mostly like today.

Tough things happen to good people all the time. It comes with being human (and not the absolute master of the universe, unfortunately). In the face of those times, courage, compassion, and connection to understanding supporters are important resources. Bert Hellinger had a saying that basically went like this: “People come seeking comfort when what they really need is courage.” I find that maintaining a positive attitude and maintaining courage are holding me in good stead. And, I have access to excellent medical care and insurance. (Thank you, former President Obama!)