The Bridge #117
in which we let sit anxiety next to hope, like two friends on a bench in a park chatting about the weather and what they'll do next weekend
Hello
& Welcome ! The Bridge is a newsletter connecting the professional and the personal creatively across cultures and a diversity of topics, until we are not only full of ideas but also ready to take action. Thanks for joining in the conversation.
Once upon a time, I heard in French a joke about Belgians: Three Belgians are sitting on a bench next to a road. They see a cow pass, and one of them takes notice. “That cow’s headed towards the river, I think.” After an hour, the other says, “That’s no cow; that was an ox.” They sit in silence for a long while more before the third speaks up saying, “Look, I’m headed home. I can’t stand you two arguing.”
When I first heard this joke, it squirmed its way into my memory bank because it captures something so foreign to my daily life, even if it’s almost something I wish for: What if we could stop worrying about geopolitics, corporate hiring practices, the troubles with refugees, the fight for gender equality, or a country’s historic racism? What if my life were so peaceful I too could be sitting out by a village road all day long and witness a very slow, non-sense-sort of argument about cows and oxen that ruffled my feathers enough I became the butt of a joke about Belgians?
Maybe your life is already that peaceful?
Something to Hear
“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (Bob Dylan)
Bob Dylan wrote this song in his early 20s, and he wrote it about a rich white guy in his early 20s who got drunk at a party, started hitting people, and even killed “by accident” a respectable, hard-working black woman in her early 50s … so (this being Maryland in the early 1960s) the man got a rather light punishment, despite his rotten racist behavior.
And the song has a swing that is gentle with judgment, and the story is told with poetic language, and the tune and the song and the story told so… might wet the mind with tears.
(The song probably took more courage to write than it would take to listen to. That said, it does take courage to face certain truths.)
Something to Read
“It’s Weird Times to be a Happy Mother” (Elissa Strauss)
This book author really cares about care. She cares about caregiving and care-receiving. She also believes that if we spend enough time caring and thinking about and talking about caring, then we might find our lives enriched and our economic systems made more resilient. AND she finds it awkward to talk about how much she loves being a mom with her other mom friends.
Elissa Strauss finds it hard to talk about being happy as a mom because since becoming a parent in 2012 she sensed it’s become more common to talk about all the difficulties of parenting. And I can relate: For me, at first, it felt refreshing to see all the talk of how difficult parenting can be, because it breaks the myths that I’d heard that “the sacrifices of parenthood are so worth it because children are such a joy” and “enjoy them while they’re young because the time flies so fast.” My reality in the early years of parenting was that it’s extremely difficult and gut-wrenchingly disruptive.
Elissa Strauss, however, believes it important to note the reasons she has reservations about speaking aloud about her love for motherhood (feminism, respect for others’ very real difficulties, and the need for changes in the workforce and government to policies that could and should support parents better). AND she also is going to reiterate that motherhood for her has been positively transformative.
While I am so glad moms feel liberated to talk about the hard parts of parenting, I worry that only talking about the hard parts make it so the experience of taking care of our children is kept small, devalued, something not worthy of our curiosity, nor our collective investment.
I often long for a whole new language, a whole new vocabulary and even context for discussing motherhood [or parenthood, for that matter], but I haven’t figured it out yet. Whereas once, we diminished motherhood by easy praise, we now often diminish it with easy complaint. Is there a way to think more expansively and holistically in our conversations about motherhood [and/or parenthood]?
Perhaps we can all work together to invent that new vocabulary?
Something to Consider
Anxiety has been one of my dominant emotions, since I was in elementary school.
Maybe it’s because I received recognition in Kindergarten for my “Diligence” (in other words, maybe it’s a character trait inherent to my personality).
OR maybe it’s related to societal expectations around performance at school (good grades) and performance at work (KPI’s etc) and consequent perfectionism that it’s taken me a long time to shake.
OR maybe it’s related to my parent’s divorce and my father’s irrefutable anger, that I struggled to talk about with others, and the social anxiety that arose with that… took a very long time to unwind.
BUT regardless of my historical buddy-buddy relationship with ANXIETY, I’m very happy to say that today I’m sometimes asked if I ever do get anxious because I appear (to some people) to be always so calm.
I do care deeply about bringing calm into other people’s lives (for my friends, my children, myself, for coaching clients, hard-working professionals, immigrants, social-impact champions and so on).
I do also care to be honest. Anxieties about being misunderstood or not getting enough done or about being unhelpful are all anxieties I have felt in the last few days, for example. Most often I feel anxiety in my gut or via a burning sort of tightness in my neck. Sometimes I can distract myself through immersion in a good story; other times I give myself a warm hug and a muscle massage; and every time I find it helps to talk things out with others. Today I’m sharing all this with you, because The Bridge is written for me and for you, to keep us calm and help us make sense.
All of it, together.
Something to Practice
Have you spent time cooking with another person before? It takes some preparation and some patience because you can’t simply do whatever you want to do, you need to communicate with the other person and share the responsibilities.
That said, it’s a great way to create connection, even before you start eating.
So… if you have the time…
Let’s cook up something tasty together.
JPC