Category: favorites

Balance Schmalance

I was off-balance all week. I celebrated the elegant evenness of the equinox by throwing up all over a neighbor’s garden. The nausea was caused by the radiation, but the feeling of being off-balance was caused by my expectations that it was going to be different. I imagined that I would spend eight weeks in Boston receiving treatments, yes, but also going for long walks and scribbling deep thoughts in my journal. I thought maybe I could even write a book in two months. I wish I were kidding. My thinking was that since I wasn’t working and the children were back in Boulder, I could be mega-productive.

The first morning after radiation, I felt ok. The second day, I couldn’t even get out of bed to get myself a glass of water. My days became very one-dimensional: horizontal. Then Fear showed up, saying all kinds of mean-spirited things like: This is just the beginning; How are you going to make it through 37 more treatments? Or You said you were going to write! Get up! I wasn’t practicing good self-compassion because I had these unreasonable expectations. I thought I could balance my time better, but I forgot that what makes balancing a trick is precisely that it is extraordinary, like the street performer who steadies himself on one hand, upside down, on a twenty-foot ladder.

And like the equinox. Twice a year, the earth doesn’t tilt toward the sun nor away from it, but seems to orbit evenly so that night and day come into balance. It’s a beautiful thing worth celebrating, but can you imagine expecting it to stay like that for the remaining 363 days of the year? The way we emphasize the need for balance in our lives makes me feel like I should figure out how to be more physically, mentally, and spiritually poised every. single. day. I get stressed because I work too much and play too little or play too much and work too little or eat too much and exercise too little or exercise too much and write too little.

What if we spent less time jamming a yoga class in after work and more time contemplating that we are living on a spinning rock that is flying through the air in an expanding universe? Maybe then we’d cut ourselves some slack.

I’ve never been very good at balancing my desires with my reality. Last week, I expected to be able to do more, to balance my radiation treatments with time in nature and time writing, and I couldn’t. Not even close. And that’s OK. What I want to change is not my reality, but my expectations. The expectation I had that I would do more only strangled the life out of a good week and made it feel like a bad week. This equinox, I vowed to lower my expectations and trust that a feeling of balance will occur as a rare and wonderful thing. And then when it happens, I’ll be pleasantly surprised, maybe I’ll even give the day a special name, and invite you over for a celebratory dance party.

*****

** If you are interested in learning skills to balance your life, or in how to let go of the idea of balance, I hope you’ll join our Brave Over Perfect Coaching group. It’s only $20 for 3 coaching calls, plus an online classroom full of resources and access to an online community of smart people with solutions. Learn more here: Brave Over Perfect Coaching.

Dear Cole on your 13th birthday

*written the day I went into 36-hours of surgery including 2 craniotomies. I came out of surgery the night of my son’s birthday.

Dear Cole,

When you were three years old, we went for a walk along the muddy banks of the Connecticut River in Lyme, New Hampshire. It was raining and we watched the swallows feed off the recently-hatched bugs on the surface of the water. You identified raccoon tracks in the mud and said, “They look like tiny hands, Mama.” Walking along the water’s edge with your hand in mine is a happy memory that I can feel even now, ten years later, on the eve of your 13th birthday. You were curious about the swallows and you wanted to get close to them, so you made up something you called the “quiet walk” where you crouched down low, spoke in loud whispers that weren’t that quiet, and lifted your legs high then put them down firmly until you put your right foot down so hard that it got stuck in the thick mud. We both laughed so hard that the swallows hid from us.

I have always loved walking with you and paying attention to the world as we go. Even if you and I often get stuck in the mud when we’re together. Your first sentence was “Mama in mud” and your second was, “Toad peed on Mama.” These were your very first stories, born in the adventures of us heading out, no matter the weather, and exploring. I picked flowers and mushrooms, you collected sticks. We usually found bugs or frogs that we wanted to bring home, but never did successfully.

And now you are turning 13 and we still we walk together. Well, I walk, and you skateboard. We head up the hill to see the view of the Flatirons and the clouds over the mountains and just how much sky there is to see in Colorado. Then I hold my breath while you turn away and ride down the steep section of Alpine Ave. You carve wide turns like you are on GS skis, picking up speed and arching your back to feel the rhythm and create balance as you lean into the hill and away from it. You look like a surfer or a dancer when you read the ground with your body.

I’m thinking about you and our walks together because we’re kind of on a walk now as we face this unknown of my surgeries, meant to save my life from this tumor. We’ve had to head out without any idea of what’s going to happen or how it’s going to turn out and that’s easy to do if you’re just going out for a walk from the house to look at tracks in the mud, but it’s a lot harder when you’re hurtling down a steep hill on a piece of wood with wheels or saying yes to someone to hold your open skull in their hands.

And yet – from the moment I knew I was pregnant with you until now, it’s always been unknown. When I was pregnant, I was sure you were a girl, for example, and I had zero idea of how to be a parent. I am way more comfortable when I am in control of what’s happening, so it was really challenging for me to let go of control and just trust that my body knew exactly what to do to bring a baby into this world and how to be a parent. I used to talk to you when you were still just the size of a lima bean inside me. I’d say, “We are in this together. It’s going to work out fine. It always has.” I remember once watching a doe immediately after she gave birth. She just stood up in the ripe red light of sunrise and listened. I thought, if I listen well enough, I’ll know what to do.

It feels important for me to tell you how perfect you are, as you are. From the moment you were born, you had already won our hearts. There is nothing you can do to make me love you more or love you less. You and I have been walking together since the beginning and we will keep walking together, no matter what distance separates us. Right now, you are waking up on the edge of a northern lake in Ontario and I am in Boston, and I feel you as if you were sitting next to me. It’s not a connection that lives only in the physical world; it’s much wider and deeper than that, like the lake itself.

I also want to thank you, Cole, for giving me so much joy. When you were little, you were really into forts – which were often just sheets and couch pillows and maybe a broom and some rope for stability. Sometimes you built forts, but sometimes you built spaceships. You were captain and gave us responsibilities. I remember once you told us that Papa was in charge of checking the ship and making everything work. Hazel was in charge of the water. And I was in charge of making sure the animals stayed in their part of the spaceship. We played under a striped sheet; I tossed “escaping” stuffed animals over cushions and you made all kinds of engine noises while Hazel kept bringing us tea cups filled with water and Papa banged on pretend dials. You still bring out the part of me that just loves to play. Thank you for forts and spaceships and sledding and skiing and making up games with tennis balls off roof tops. Thank you for making me laugh all the time – your quick wit is one of your many gifts. Please give of your humor generously because you can change a mood from dark to light in a heartbeat with it.

And now you are a teenager. The thing about the teenage years that you are now entering is that these are the years when you practice making and keeping friends. Practice is the key word here – there isn’t a shortcut to figuring our relationships – you kind of have to go through it all. One minute you’ll feel like you belong, the next, rejected, the next betrayed, the next, accepted. It’s all very confusing. My advice is to make friends with lots of different kinds of people, girls, too. It takes more effort, but it’s worth it. People who are different from you teach you the most. Remember, when you feel left out, it’s not because your friends got together and planned to ignore you – but rather because they’re a bunch of human beings swimming around in their own emotional soup. The trick is to give people the benefit of the doubt because then you can actually get somewhere: learn, grow, move on, go deeper into what it means to be a good friend. It’s also worth giving others the benefit of the doubt because you’re going to ditch someone a few times too and it’s not because you’re a jerk. It’s because you’re still just a dumb kid learning and growing: a work in progress.

As a work in progress, be kind to yourself. I wasted too much energy on trying to make everyone happy and trying to make everything come out a certain way and then blaming myself for not being good enough when it didn’t. The reason it’s important not to give in to those negative thoughts is because you cannot be kind to others if you are not kind to yourself. It’s like trying to dance with someone without moving your feet.

The only other thing I want to tell you right now is that none of what is happening to me is your responsibility. And what I mean is that you may feel the need to be strong for Hazel or for Papa. Or you may feel really sad or angry. You may feel nothing at all. I have felt all of these ways, sometimes in the space of 5 minutes. But everyone is going to respond differently and that is not just normal, it is necessary. Be patient with yourself. There is nothing you can do to change what is and I believe there is a deeper, loving intelligence at play that will make sure that all will be well.

I am not afraid right now. I feel so loved and held. And I feel so connected to you, so in love and grateful for our amazing family. I really do. You and I have many more walks together and I can’t wait to explore the world with you. You’re such good company, Cole – and you make me so happy.

Happy Birthday, Cole. Papa and I love you, unconditionally. Go into the world knowing that and watch the way the world responds back with love.

Xoxo Mama

by Susie Rinehart

The Art & Science of the Nap

A nap is a thing of beauty. World peace is within reach. All we have to do is nap. It’s the most underused, powerful tool for self-care and work productivity. There’s science behind this. My doctors told me that short naps, between ten and twenty minutes, do more for lessening anxiety and improving focus than caffeine or even adding an hour of sleep at night. Increasingly, companies are creating special napping areas to give their employees a chance to recharge. Apparently, Google, Huffington Post, Zappos, Procter & Gamble all have nap rooms and encourage napping. They don’t just want their teams to work hard, they want them to work smart. I have been thinking about the nap as a way to begin again in the new year. After all, it’s my favorite way to reset, renew, and reinvigorate any day.

Here are a few tricks I’ve discovered as I channeled my perfectionist tendencies into napping:

Keep it short: 10-20 minutes allows you to slip into light sleep, enough to recharge without feeling more groggy. On weekends, I go for the luscious 60-minute nap!

Darkness helps: Cover your eyes with a mask or a hat. I use earplugs too–I can still hear my alarm with them in, but I don’t get sucked into nearby conversations.

Rest counts: Don’t worry if you don’t actually sleep. Just lie there and breathe deeply.

Imagine paradise: Picture yourself in a blissful, relaxing place to drown out the to-do list.

Build it in: Schedule it into your day. I plan when I am going to eat lunch, and when I am going to nap. Sometimes they are back-to-back. For me, the best time to nap is between 1-4pm.

Set an alarm: I use a timer, set at 12 or 20 minutes. I don’t trust myself to wake up without it.

Practice: Commit for 21 days. Make it a habit before deciding if you can or can’t nap.

Ok nappers out there: what are your best tricks? I’d love to know!

It used to frustrate me that I couldn’t make it through a day without lying down since the surgeries this past summer. In September, I was asleep more than awake and I understood it to be apart of the healing process. But by October, naps made me feel fragile. In November, I called myself weak. In December, I thought my low energy was a sign that I would never be strong again. Over the holidays, the naps felt like painful reminders of how much had changed since last year when a day wasn’t complete without a morning run, an afternoon ski, and an evening ice skate. This year, a good day included two naps and a bath.

The feeling that I shouldn’t lie down comes from the same place of shame that I feel if I am not producing something or fixing something. To do nothing feels wrong. But the brave thing for me to do is to nap. There is deep beauty to just being. After a nap, I am more present with the people I love. I am also more positive. I’ve even solved problems while napping. I wake up, knowing what to do or how to compose that tricky email. And when that doesn’t happen, I am at least better able to deal with drama.

I have been on the quest for the perfect nap ever since I can remember. As a child, I fell asleep in the sandbox, on a chairlift, while paddling a canoe. In college, I fell asleep in every class that began after one o’clock. I felt terrible about it. My professors got together and recommended that I go to a sleep clinic to determine if I had a disorder. They decided that I must have narcolepsy; it couldn’t possibly be their teaching that was putting me to sleep. I went home and told my parents. Next, I overheard my mother say to a large crowd of friends at a holiday party, “My daughter has a small necrophilia problem.”

This is what I learned: I don’t have narcolepsy (or necrophilia, thank goodness). I spent twelve hours hooked up to electrodes and video cameras in a tiny room to figure this out. They monitored my brain activity, lungs, heart rate, plus any movement in my legs, arms, or eyes. They filmed me sleeping and they set alarms to wake me up at random times. They filmed that too. The videos showed that my right foot kicks slightly, all the time. The doctors said, “You’re still running, even in your sleep. It’s enough to make you tired the next day.” The prescription they gave me? 1-2 short naps a day.

The doctors explained that a complete sleep cycle takes between 60 and 90 minutes. Most people drop into slow wave sleep (deep, dream-filled dozing) after 20 minutes. So the trick is to train your body to nap between 10-20 minutes at a time. That way, you stay in light sleep, and gain energy when you wake up. If you nap longer than 20 minutes, you risk waking up in slow wave sleep and feeling super groggy. What if you can’t fall asleep because your mind is spinning fast with the list of things to do? You breathe deeply and rest. There is a belief in eastern medicine that resting is just as good as sleeping for your health, immune system, and brain activity.

In college, I learned to build naps into my day. Instead of fighting the head nods while reading, I practiced putting my head down the minute I arrived at the library. It worked. The first fifteen minutes of a homework session began with my head on the table, out cold. After that, I could read for hours without stopping.

Later, when I was helping to run a school and pregnant, I used to ask a colleague to watch my door for six minutes while I lay down. I could sleep, even snore, and wake up refreshed after just six minutes. I don’t think I would have made it through those years without those holy six minutes each day. But I had to master the 10-20 minute nap first before I could pull off that short of a nap. The trick is to find that magic number of minutes that allows you to decompress and wake up feeling refreshed.

Now I nap at least once a day. I just napped in the middle of writing this reflection. Over the holidays, I was a moveable nap. I napped on the couch, in front of a friend’s fireplace, on the floor, drooling on the rug. I love that feeling right before I fall asleep, when I tug a blanket over my shoulders, and sink into silence, knowing that soon I will be sound asleep. This year, I resolve to focus on that good feeling and ignore the one that says I am not doing enough.

Love,

Susie

For more reflections, sign up at www.susierinehart.com Oh! and come check out the site; there’s a new “Favorites” page and other fun changes. xox s

*****

by Susie Rinehart

Tumor Can’t Take My Voice

Last week I learned I have a tumor at the base of my skull that is slowly taking over my brain stem. “First, your tongue will go numb. Then you’ll lose your voice,” said my doctor in the same matter-of-fact tone that he might have said, “First your appetizer will arrive. Then you’ll get your salad.”

At 45 years old, I was, up until this moment, medically “boring.” No health or genetic history of any kind. Previous conditions: none. Previous surgeries: wisdom teeth removal. I ran ultramarathons and often podiumed in my age group. The news was a shock. I stared at the screen with the black and white images of my skull and tried to make sense of this white growth, shaped like storm clouds, pushing into the dark spaces around my tongue and vocal chords.

“How does your voice feel now?” My doctor asked, “Are you able to use it whenever you want?” I said yes, but the question hung there for a moment.

Usually, when the topic of “Finding Your Voice” is mentioned, it’s about permission, but I feel lucky to have been born into a time and place where I feel free to speak up and speak out. But that doesn’t mean I have known how to find my voice and use it to author my life. The idea that I might permanently lose the ability to speak made me acutely aware of how little I genuinely used my voice on a daily basis.

Take the other morning as an example. I woke up feeling raw and scared by this new diagnosis. My husband was making himself breakfast. Instead of saying how I felt, I used my voice to say, “Should you really be having two fried eggs for breakfast again?” Then a neighbor asked how I was feeling, and because I didn’t want to upset her, I said, “I’m fine.” Later at work, colleagues asked me how a project was going. What I really wanted was their support, but because I didn’t want them to feel burdened, I opened my mouth to ask for help and closed it again. Then when I went home in the evening and felt helpless to manage my children’s screen time, I used my voice to scream at them and make them cry.

I was raised to be nice, to avoid conflict, to keep the peace. For people outside the house, I am calm and kind, generous and positive. I use my voice to say what I think others want to hear. Then later, at home, the volcano inside me erupts as resentment or rage and then my children and I suffer the consequences of my reluctance to use my true voice all day long. There is nothing peace-making about avoiding saying things that might be uncomfortable. There are only the consequences: strained relationships and a lost, unused voice, maybe forever.

The voice I want to find in me and in you is the one that sings, the one that moans, the one that trembles and cries and howls and roars—a voice that is primal and real– one that will make me soar and others stop in their tracks and listen. It is not the voice that hedges or hesitates, judges or gets jealous. The voice I want to find is the one that has the passion of that angry voice when pushed to the edge, but without the helplessness. Can you imagine if that voice was tamed, or if we exercised its muscles more often in small ways? It would come out as song.

We are born with a voice that is powerful. Then one day we are teased or ignored or shamed for saying how we feel, and suddenly our voice makes us feel unsafe. Maybe finding our voice requires retracing our steps and locating where we last remember using it. Then we can begin again to express ourselves, however awkwardly.

I have a memory like a snapshot of when I was twelve and the girls in my cabin at summer camp made a list of our names and the expression we could most often be heard saying. Mine was, “Stop it! It’s NOT funny!” When I saw what they had written, I was horrified. Now I knew that they saw me as a whiny, defensive, irascible wimp. Never mind that saying, “It’s not funny” might have been a perfectly legitimate way of standing up for myself. It didn’t matter because I wanted to be seen as fun and easy to be around. I wanted to be loved and included, and so I began artfully saying anything, or nothing at all, to earn that kind of belonging.

Another memory: at fifteen, I liked to write poetry. Then a boy I liked scribbled in the margins of one of my poems, “If there is an original thought in here somewhere, I can’t find it.” I ripped up the poems and threw them away.

Moments like these, layered like weights on a scale, tipped me off balance. I stopped using my voice to express myself and instead used it to say what I thought others wanted to hear. In the process, I lost my voice. Now, finding my voice feels like listening to the sound of a hawk’s wings high above me. Or rather concentrating on something small like the wings of a bee or a butterfly.

While sitting in the doctor’s office, I had a disturbing thought. Finding my voice was no longer just a phrase from empowered women’s literature, but a matter of life or death. What if this tumor moved into the place on my vocal chords because the area seemed available or abandoned? The thought frightened me, then gave me an idea. Now, using my voice might be as effective as flipping on a light switch and letting the tumor know, “Sorry. No Vacancy: This space is occupied and home to a powerful, wild voice that cannot be silenced.

As you can imagine, I am willing to try anything to heal. I left the doctor’s office determined to try an experiment; I would use my voice to say what I felt and knock this hobo tumor right out of my brain-stem railcar.

The next thing that happened was that some friends invited me out to a movie. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t want to stay home alone that night either. I also thought it would hurt their feelings if I said no. So I went. (Old habits die hard.) Well, the movie that was labeled a comedy was grim; the whole thing was filmed in dark green and brown. It played the same violin lines of music over and over. People died senseless, graphic deaths. No one smiled. I sat there in pain, but to get up and walk out of the theater felt strangely not obvious. It felt like I had to stay, because that is just what one does. But with the courage of my new experiment, I leaned over to my friend and said, “I’m going to leave now.” Then when people on screen started kicking dogs to death and blinding themselves with steak knives, I crawled over my friends and left the theater.

I went for a walk and watched the sunset over the mountains. I had a strange sense of exhilaration, so different than the dread I felt in the dark theater. I had walked out. I would never have done that before—it would have felt weak or just rude. But the idea that I could, and that I did, felt like freedom. And you know what? Another woman sitting behind me walked out right after I did. I wonder how many of us were sitting in that theater, waiting for it to get better, and not doing anything.

It shouldn’t have to take a diagnosis of a massive tumor to recognize that there is nothing benign about not expressing ourselves. The question I am living with now isn’t, “When will I lose my voice?” But rather, “When did I let it go?” When did I ignore it so much that it walked away, opening the door for something ominous to move in?

Maybe someday soon I will use my voice to end violence and inequality or save lives in a big way. But beginning small feels like a form of deep listening and discovery. Now I check in with myself moment to moment. How do I feel right now? What do I really want to say or create with this, my only voice?

Then I close my eyes and imagine that every time I open my mouth to express myself fully, the force of my truth rips the tumor storm clouds off my vocal chords, and blows them out of my mouth. I keep my eyes closed and start to sing, feeling these tiny tumor clouds rolling like tumbleweed down a dusty, dirt road, far, far away.

*****

by Susie Rinehart

Balance Shmalance

I was off-balance all week. I celebrated the elegant evenness of the equinox by throwing up all over a neighbor’s garden. The nausea was caused by the radiation, but the feeling of being off-balance was caused by my expectations that it was going to be different. I imagined that I would spend these eight weeks in Boston receiving treatments, yes, but also going for long walks and scribbling deep thoughts in my journal. I thought maybe I could even write a book in these two months. I wish I were kidding. My thinking was that since I wasn’t working and the children were back in Boulder, I could be mega-productive.

What does this have to do with week 1 of radiation? Just this: I’ve never been very good at balancing my desires with my reality. Last week, I expected to be able to do more, to balance my radiation treatments with time in nature and time writing, and I couldn’t. Not even close. And that’s OK. What I want to change is not my reality, but my expectations. The expectation I had that I would do more strangled the life out of a good week and made it feel like a bad week. This equinox, I vow to lower my expectations and trust that a feeling of balance will occur as a rare and wonderful thing. And then when it happens, I’ll be pleasantly surprised, maybe I’ll even give the day a special name, and invite you over for a celebratory dance party.

*****

by Susie Rinehart

In A Dark Time the Eye Begins to See

So begins a poem by Theodore Roethke (pr. Ret-ke) that I used to teach. In a simple classroom on a farm in Vermont, we sat around a large maple table, reading the lines out loud together. We did this on the anniversary of 9-11. We pulled out the poem again when one of my students was paralyzed in a bike accident, and again when a faculty member’s brother died. It was a tradition born in the belief that poetry heals; it universalizes the human condition and gives specific language to feelings of sorrow that we share.

I’m thinking about this poem again because it is a dark time in America and across the ocean right now. Horrible shootings. Senseless, un-repairable bombings and violence. Politicians screaming offensive remarks, clouding the air with hatred. A people divided and afraid.

I know the purity of pure despair
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall—

I went for a run early this morning and a police car rolled up next to me in the dawn-dim light and I felt afraid. What was he going to do to me? I slowed down and let the car pass. A few minutes later, a young man was walking towards me. I felt afraid. Did he have a gun? I crossed the street and picked up my pace. Then I heard a deafening boom from somewhere off to my right. It was likely just a truck backfiring at a construction site, but I jumped. Both feet came off the sidewalk. I’m clearly on edge.

Plus, in my situation now, knowing that I have an extensive tumor threatening my brain stem and my ability to breathe, I can go to a dark place really fast. And I do. What if I don’t make it through the night? How will my daughter, who sleeps with me when she has nightmares, handle waking up next to her un-breathing mother? See, I told you I can go to a dark place, fast.

That place among the rocks, is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

The thing is, I need to go to those dark places as part of the process. It doesn’t help to push those thoughts away – they just keep on coming back, knocking louder. So I am practicing sitting here in the dark, paying attention. It’s like walking in a forest at night without a flashlight and slowly letting my eyes adjust to the dark.

I also need to remember lessons learned from natural history. A deer, when it senses the presence of a mountain lion, jumps and runs away. Adrenaline pumping through her veins, she can move fast and far in just fifteen minutes. But then she stops running and stands still. She listens, and slowly relaxes. She lets her nervous system process the adrenaline and let it go. She stands there, licking the dew off the grass blades far from her fight/flight center where she was living just moments before. She recovers fully so that if the lion approaches again, she will be able to escape.

But in these dark times, we are living in our fear centers all the time. Our bodies can’t tell that there is no lion and that this is not, in fact, a case of life and death. We feel threatened, unsafe, out of control. And so our oldest protective fight/flight nervous system kicks in. The result is that we are trying to make decisions, parent, and live from the core of a nervous system that is only designed to help us for fifteen minutes, to immediately escape danger.

So what do we do? Step back and gain perspective. It’s been dark before. It will be dark again. We can still move forward in the dark. Ask the mothers of the middle ages. Ask the widows of the civil war. Ask the children of internment camps. Ask the young people of the late 1960s when we were caught in an endless stream of assassinations and war in Vietnam. Is this, now, really, the darkest time?

We have a tendency to imagine that the Golden Age is behind us, those days when people climbed hilltops to sit under trees and write poetry. Times were simpler, which must mean better than now. But is that really true?

Dark, dark my light.
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.

This morning, I sit up in bed and close my eyes, letting waves of fear and emotion about my upcoming surgeries pass through me. I breathe and relax. What do I notice in the dark? I see that I have lived in fear for too long. I also see that I have counted on others to lead: politicians, lawmakers, and people I have deemed less-busy than me.

If it was clear before, it is vivid now. We need to step up. When my surgeries are behind me, I need to rearrange my days and devote at least 10% of my time to directly advocating for non-violence, for wild places, for gender equality, for gun-control laws. We’re sitting in the dark in our living rooms with the doors locked, when we should be sitting on our representatives’ doorsteps, saying we’re here to help you push peace forward.

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

With my students, we used to linger on this confusing last line of Roethke’s poem, trying to make sense of it. This morning, I see the lowercase, singular “one” as me sitting in the dark, facing my personal fears. And I see the capitalized “One” as all of us. The way forward for me to heal is through the universal. We are all in pain and instead of just spinning in my own fears, I may as well show up and help others out. Maybe in the process of being in the dark together, we heal, and set each other free.
***

by Susie Rinehart

Terrorists or Neurosurgeons?

“You know what I think when I see a muslim man in the airport?” my husband Kurt asked me as we waited in the security line at the Phoenix airport. “What?” I looked around nervously, wondering where this might be going.

“Neurosurgeon,” Kurt said, and smiled.

Kurt and I have spent the last two weeks in airports and in doctors offices across the country. When I first received my diagnosis of a skull-base tumor, I called the only neurosurgeon I knew, Dr. Moustapha Abou-Samra, in California. He is an immigrant, the father of two of my former students, and a man I hadn’t spoken with in over 20 years. He was on vacation and yet he returned my call immediately. He took the time to walk us through the difficult journey ahead.

Three days ago we were in Boston because the leading world expert on skull-base tumors, Dr. Ossama Al-Mefty, an immigrant from Syria, had seen my MRI scans. He personally spent two hours with us during his dinner time, just to help us understand my diagnosis. Today we were in Phoenix, sitting for five hours in a packed waiting room at the Barrow Neurological Institute. The surgeon, Dr. Spetzler, an immigrant from Germany, had made an extra effort to see me; I would be one of 108 patients his team of surgeons would meet that day.

In the waiting room in Phoenix, there were large screen TVs on every wall, broadcasting the Republican National Convention and its theme, “Make America Safe Again.” The waiting room was quiet and tense. There was an older couple next to me. The man wore a US VET ball cap. He told me he was there for a check-up after a near-fatal aneurism. Dr. Spetzler had saved his life. It was hard to hear him when he spoke because the convention goers on the TVs were so ravenously enthusiastic about their candidate that the room seemed to erupt into Bieber-Fever shrieking every few minutes.

“We need a total and complete shutdown of muslims entering the United States,” Donald Trump has declared, and as I watched the convention, the speakers who seemed to get the loudest shrieks of approval were the ones who talked about the need to strengthen our borders. Our country’s problems are clearly the fault of those nasty, no-good immigrants.

Are these the same immigrants that are known for their expertise in solving complex neurosurgical problems? The ones who spend every waking minute dedicated to saving the lives of Americans?

We chose our surgeon, Dr. Ossama Al-Mefty, because of his unparalleled skill and experience, not to mention his complete devotion to caring for his patients, regardless of their background or religion. But hey, shut those borders down! We don’t need any more smart, dedicated people in this country.

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by Susie Rinehart

Brave Over Perfect

I come from a long line of strong women. My mother’s mother taught me how to hold a shovel, my father’s mother taught me how to hold a cigarette. People called me tough, independent, and smart. It was a great childhood, and for that I am truly grateful, but I was ultimately clueless when it came to making big decisions about relationships, love, work, and spirit. No one taught me how to be curious about my emotions (Why bother?) or how to take care of myself (Don’t be so selfish!). There were certain kinds of brave that I was good at: I could run up mountains and dive head first into giant waves. But there were other kinds of brave I needed to develop: how to stay true to myself in a crowd, how to face conflict, and how to keep trying when it doesn’t turn out perfectly.
The opposite of joy is not sadness, but perfectionism. When I am straining to do all parts of my life well with the hope that I will rise above confusion and criticism, that’s what I call perfectionism. The world doesn’t need us to be perfect, it just needs us to find the courage to contribute to the common good.
These strong women raised me to believe that I could be anything I wanted to be. But the way I internalized that message was that I must be great. And there were many times that I didn’t feel capable of being great and so I gave up. All I ever saw were the outer, perfect performances of women in my life: my mother, in a graduation gown, receiving her second advanced degree, and her friends’ immaculate homes and flawless appearances. I never heard about their inner conflict, so that when I encountered doubt or my own imperfections as the leader of a school, as the director of a company, and as a mother, I thought that the confusion I experienced was uniquely mine. I assumed everyone else knew exactly what she or he was doing.
You may feel that way sometimes, like you are not good enough, or brave enough, or that there is something wrong with you because you can’t keep up with the world’s expectations. There is nothing wrong with you. Just ask people of all ages for their stories. Then listen to the constellations of suffering and beauty that make up who we are.
In teaching adolescents for over twenty years, I have had the privilege of listening to their biggest questions and concerns. Here’s how one girl I shall call Annie sums up her experience moving through the maze of defining herself. “We are like glass lanterns. There is a bottom: we are lesser than—and there is this top: we better be perfect—and then there is this hollow middle with an elusive wick, waiting for us to strike the match.” Maybe you too were conditioned to be good at striving for the top, reaching for external goals and illusory perfection, but does it leave you feeling anxious and hollow?
As a teacher, I heard this question a lot: “Is this right?” “Is this answer on the test right?” “Am I doing this essay right?” I understood my students’ desire; I had spent plenty of late nights in school erasing what I had written and starting over in order to get it right. But now the challenge is: How do we cultivate enough courage to truly banish the idea that we have to get it right before we begin?
The urgency to take on this challenge hit me one day, far away from home. I was traveling with students in Nepal on a cultural exchange. At 12,000 feet above sea level, we made our way along a narrow path that wound through cultivated gardens and modest homes. We came around a corner and there was a young mother with three of her children walking towards us, carrying large bundles of firewood on their backs. When we met in the path, Jackie, the student in front of our small group, put her palms together and bowed low to the woman to greet her. “Is this right?” She called out to me, at the back of the line, while the young mother bowed back at her. Jackie never saw the woman’s wide, affirming smile, because she was looking back at me, seeking approval. She also never saw the children rushing to embrace her.
It’s not Jackie’s fault. She was used to a system that rewarded her for playing by the rules. It made sense that she was trying to make a good impression, but the moment made me wonder, “What are we missing in our effort to get it right all the time?” Real connection. Abundant joy. Balance. Creativity. Plus the chance to play more, to tinker and try things, to roll up our sleeves and be apart of the teams that are innovating to solve big problems with no single, right answer.
The world cannot wait while we sit alone at our desks, erasing and starting over, trying to get it perfect. The world needs us to iterate and to expand the limits of what is possible if we want to make change. The only thing getting in the way is that we get stuck trying to find the single, right way. We don’t know who we are and what we want sometimes, and how to move forward. The more clear and grounded we can get about ourselves, the more impact we can make. But we have to be willing to do the work of discovering who we are.
Here’s where I want to take your hand in mine and say, “Let’s go find a different way together.” Let’s practice being brave over perfect on a daily basis until we strike the match and follow the light, full of joy.
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