The Power to Act

Two days ago my 92 year old Aunt Ruth fell while moving from the table.  Now, if this were to happen to any other 92 year old woman, it may have been tragic, but not my Aunt Ruth because she still has an indomitable spirit and physical resiliency.   She got up, dusted herself off and went out to breakfast with a girl friend.  Her concession was to return home after breakfast to rest.  She felt a little unstable and unsettled from the fall and wanted the comfort of her cane for awhile and the safety of her familiar surroundings.  Her complaint was that she realized that she needed to stop and get her bearings before she moved around, while my complaint was that she was my aunt by marriage, so I couldn’t inherit her genes. At ninety, after years of constant excruciating pain, she had knee replacement and wondered why she waited so long.   She is like the energizer bunny – she just keeps going.

If my Aunt Ruth is a study of movement in action, then my Mother was a study of the importance of taking care of herself.  As a young mother and wife she used every ounce of her energy to make a home and rear her growing family. In her early years things like neatness and order drove her, but in her mid thirties it took a bout with rheumatic fever and rheumatoid arthritis for her to learn to slow down and take care of herself.  After seven children her body couldn’t sustain that level of activity; she had to regroup and figure how to make her life work.  From that illness she found and perfected the art of the afternoon nap.  It didn’t matter what the rest of the world needed or wanted, nor did it matter whether the beds were made or there was dust on the counter.  When my mother was tired she rested.

Over the years my own behavior seemed to be modeled after these two strong and wise female role models.  During younger years I rejected the wisdom of my mother and modeled my life on my Aunt Ruth.  I took on challenges and focused my energies on achieving.  I taught high school in Boston,  journeyed to Iran to set up the first secretarial school and transitioned to the business world, joined United Technologies and then General Electric.  Life was a banquet and I wanted to partake of everything.  Rest was for the faint of heart.  There was a big beautiful world to conquer and I connected it with the force and velocity of my actions.  Obstacles were to be surmounted and strategies laid for achieving.   It’s only with age that I understood that dancing fast does not mean you’ll dance well.  Achievement has its own paradox; more can get you less and ease trumps force every time! It’s one thing to know it, it’s another thing to relax our old ways of behaving and take on new ones.

After seven years as the Executive Director of the Escape Family Resource Center (ESCAPE), which was a child abuse prevention agency, I was tired of being tired.  I felt physically abused!  I was good at what I did, but when the weekend came I was depleted and needed the entire weekend to replenish. As in my youth I threw myself into work with the zest of a twenty year old. The problem was that I was now in my mid forties.  Truthfully it was one of the ways I avoided grieving the loss of my first husband. Nine years after his death, I realized I was ready to move back out into the social world as a single woman again. It was time for me to let another man enter my life. Emotionally I was ready but the physical activity of my work week did not provide me with the energy needed for a social life. Where my Aunt Ruth never seemed to tire I was seriously depleted.  Something was wrong!

The definition of insanity is ‘continuing to do the same things and expect a different outcome.’  With that wisdom in hand, I emulated my mother’s behavior and learned how to take care of myself by metaphorically ‘learning to take naps’ although I called it meditation. I slowed down to read and explored my inner world. I traded daily treadmill excursions with walks in my neighborhood.  After years of not wanting to emulate my mother’s life style, I saw the wisdom of her choices and began to steer the ship called Judith to calmer ports of call where I could regroup and find a rhythm that better served me.

Instead of pushing forward like my aunt to find my next position, I slowed down and learned to become more reflective; to figure out what I needed to learn from my present situation at ESCAPE in order to free myself up to have the next position come to me.  It was on a sunny day while lying in a hammock reading Julia Cameron’s book, The Artists Way, that the realization burst out from within.  I was not responsible for everybody and everyone. Why did I know I found pay dirt?   Tears flowed freely.  Salty tears of grief for the little girl within me who took on the enormous role of being the responsible one.  My frenetic actions were not noble at all.  They were the actions of a child who felt very responsible for people and situations around her. With that knowledge, life as I knew it was about to change.

When financial crisis came to ESCAPE, I responded to it differently.  Instead of reacting out of the fear of feeling totally responsible for the organization’s success, I brought my team together and we created our plan.  With the plan in hand I went to the Board of Directors and shared our plan and then asked them to create their own plan.  The by-product of my letting others share the responsibility of the organization’s success was that we made more money than ever.   Within a month of realizing this life lesson, I got a call from an ex-board member who told me about a woman he was working with.  She was doing something that he thought I did naturally.  He called it coaching. With that call I found my next career as a leadership coach and it provided me the opportunity to slow down and prepare myself for letting another man into my life.  Within four months of giving my notice of resignation, I met Bruce at the first coaching conference held in Houston.

Now in my 60’s I see that at best our actions are tempered by our life’s circumstances.  My aunt and my mother collapsed their behavior with who they were.  Change in behavior only came with crisis.  I was blessed to have grown up at a time when we learned to divide a child’s behavior from the child.  That lesson has served me well over the years.  At the Newfield Network I learned that unconscious behavior comes out of our past experiences. Today I have an ongoing practice of checking my behaviors to make sure it is in alignment with the life I want to live. True north is not determined by how I behaved in the past but on the behavior that will support how I intend my life to be in the future.  Toward that end I’ve retired the ‘energizer bunny’ and added time each day to ‘nap’ or meditate!  That behavior better supports the life I intend to live!

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