Happy Spring everyone! For some reason writing this season’s newsletter has felt really challenging. While I’ve had many different ideas, none of them really captured my attention to write. They’ve interested me, but not enough to mine my brain and my experiences to flesh them out into a full newsletter – not right now anyway. And I’m not really sure why getting started and committing to a theme has been so challenging, other than the fact that it’s the first one of 2024, and I want it to be great, significant, to carry some meaning, and truly come from my heart – in essence I want it to be “perfect”! Aaahhh, perfection – one of my biggest obstacles, and I’m sure at least some of you can identify with this.
Doing things right, doing them well, expecting a lot of and from myself while doubting myself and my abilities: this struggle has plagued me for as long as I can remember. When I was 8 years old, I went for ice skating lessons because my older brother wanted to practice skating so he could play ice hockey with his friends. I laced up my ice hockey skates (no girly white figure skates for this tom-boy) for the very first time for the first session, and stumbled onto the ice. Honestly, I was terrible, truly terrible. I had no balance and was barely able to shuffle across the ice. It didn’t get much better over the next few weeks of classes. The week before our last session, our instructor told us that she was going to teach us some spins and jumps, just to get a taste of spinning and jumping, just for fun. As the last session approached I found myself with butterflies in my stomach and huge doubts. I could just about stand and shuffle on the ice, let alone spin and jump. Was she crazy?! Needless to say I made up some excuse not to go and that was it. I never learned spins or jumps, and honestly I don’t think I laced up a pair of ice skates again until I was 40!
My fear that I wouldn’t be able to do what the instructor suggested, or be any good at it took hold and ultimately robbed me of a potentially fun experience. And, unfortunately this mind-set has challenged me ever since. Why and how I adopted this mind-set is still unknown to me. What I have noticed, however, is that when we get stuck in the loop of having to do things right or perfectly, we not only sabotage any effort we might put in, but we can also rob ourselves of truly experiencing and enjoying whatever it is we are attempting to do. There is no way to be fully present in an activity if we are focused on trying to be the best or trying to do it perfectly from the start. Think about doing a yoga pose that challenges you. If you are constantly judging your “growth” in the pose or looking at the person next to you, comparing your version of the pose to theirs, how can you really be feeling the pose in your body?
Very slowly and reluctantly, I am learning that when I’m stuck in perfection mode, I simply stay stuck, either because I’m somehow relating what I’m trying to do to a past experience that maybe didn’t work out as I imagined it would, or I’m projecting how I’ll fall short of my expectations before I even give it a chance. Being caught in these two places doesn’t allow me to experience the beauty and truth of what is happening and what could potentially happen. It takes me out of the flow of life and even sets me up to not have the best experience possible – or worse, like my 8-year-old self, no experience at all.
In contrast, I remember when I was a teenager, my mom, who is a great cook and baker, decided to make a cake for dessert – nothing fancy, just a basic chocolate layer cake. For whatever reason it didn’t rise, and remained as flat as a pancake. Because she didn’t have time to start all over again, she slapped some icing on each layer and served it, calling it her brownie cake. It tasted amazing and we all loved breaking off pieces of it to mobble down. In that moment she let go of having to make the perfect layer cake. Whether she beat herself up about it, I’ll never know, but she served the brownie cake with confidence, and a sense of humor. If she had decided not to serve it because it wasn’t the perfect “Betty Crocker” layer cake, we would have never experienced the glory of the delicious brownie cake.
While I know it isn’t always easy to get out of our own ways and let go of our hopes and dreams for life to be a certain way, my hope is that we – I – can try to let go a little and let things unfold as they will; to listen in some way to our instincts; to believe that there is a plan in place out there, even if we can’t see it; to trust that whatever decisions we make – be they the most perfect or most “right” or not – we will learn something simply because we made a choice. For me, I need to allow myself to simply make a choice and remember that the learning and the experience are as important as the outcome.
