Weeknotes #27: How do we begin?
You are reading ‘Like person, like coach’: explorations at the intersection of personal narrative and coaching practice:
‘Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.’
- Izumi Shikibu
This year doesn’t start with goals, passionate drive, strong will, a bucket list or a plan to have achieved by the time it all winds down again. It starts instead with beginning differently. I didn’t make this decision, it sort of arrived of its own accord; perhaps because of winter, or a wearing last year, or after too many attempts at starting too many years living for outcomes and getting the same results.
How do we begin without wanting to control the ending? How do we begin?
I’ve seen it often in therapy how uncomfortable it’s like to sit with not knowing. It feels so much less exciting, admirable, LinkedIn-able. Waiting to know how I feel about something, waiting to know what I want to do next, where I’m going - it feels more like the cells of my body rearranging (through connection) rather than a set of coaching questions that ask me to track measures, outcomes, goals.
I guess it feels quiet, at times lonely, involves less guarantees - - to act from this stance of listening, waiting, taking time, taking a breath.
So I begin again. This time, a little less proud, a little more ready. To simply write. Because no one needs to like it. I mean, it’s ludicrous that for so many years I thought that other people need to like what I make. It’s irrelevant because it’s necessary. It’s necessary that I write. I can see clusters of thoughts and feelings somewhere in my mind’s eye and the tank is filling up.
In the last few weeks I’ve been:
* Feeling less like I’m essentially good and feeling less invested in proving it (nb. this doesn’t mean I’m off the hook, actually it makes me be more on the hook). Báyò as always puts words to this through his particular lens on whiteness and racism:
‘How my prejudice redeemed me from believing I was essentially good.’
* Reflecting on forgiveness and a counter-cultural narrative of not assigning harmful behaviour to ‘they did the best they could’. Maybe not everything is reedemable? Reading this article about poet’s Shane Mc Crae’s experience of racism and abuse puts precise words to this.
* I’m returning to Parable of the Sower by Octavaia Butler, it feels timely and I feel connected to Lauren, as a person with hyperempathy. This quote might be the quote I need to come back to throughout this year to remind myself of the ambivalence that often accompanies change-work: personal, organisational, societal:
“Drowning people
Sometimes die
Fighting their rescuers.”
- Octavia Butler
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