Year-notes and the word for the world/for me/for now
Phase 1 — the project of being human
It’s deep in the afternoon on a Saturday. I’m in the car with my family — they’re plugged into their devices, listening to their music, and I’m listening for the umpteenth time, to Pádraig Ó Tuama describe some of the most wonderful poetry that carried me through the rough times of 2020 and 21. It’s a podcast called Poetry Unbound, and I’m listening to it as a result of the OnBeing Project. He’s reading “Phase One” by Dilruba Ahmed, and I hear him say:
“I forgive you I forgive you”
(here’s an excerpt — mid stanza, apologies)
“I forgive you. I forgive
you. I forgive you. For growing
a capacity for love that is great
but matched only, perhaps,
by your loneliness. For being unableto forgive yourself first so you
could then forgive others and
at last find a way to become
the love that you want in this world.”
The plains of the midlands are a vast expanse, or it seems, to the untrained eye, and the sun is high overhead, as it is in the late afternoon in summer. The poem settles in me.
Each year, I start with a word. 2022’s word, was grounding. Starting with a word is intentionally not a lot, but it gives me an anchor to work from at the beginning, and as I think about the year after it is done. I did intentional work on grounding myself, just as I promised I would, preparing internally for a year of change that I could see coming within myself.
On this Saturday in December, listening to this poem, it occurs to me that what I’m really working on, is forgiving myself for my humanity. Forgiving myself for all the things not done this year — the articles from the ResearchRepos project sitting 90% done but not published. The balls I dropped at work. The social outings not done. The people I never called back. The emails I forgot to reply to. It settles so firmly in me, that I wrote about it in my latest ‘weeknotes’ — a weeknote that took 3 months to write.
Now at the end of the year, with the dissolution of my marriage, the end of my youngest child’s primary school years, and having put down intentionally all the external public things I needed to put down in order to walk through all of that, I can see the lesson from the year — one I learned with the deepest gratitude from my husband as we worked intentionally on our ending with the same love and trust that guided us all these years, from everyone who held me up, from the people who walked, and continue to walk that path with me.
The lesson I learned, was: Lead with love, wherever you can.
This year, I can reflect that despite my recent concentration on all the things I did not do, the mistakes I made, the one dear friendship I lost, that I did succeed, sometimes. And the times I succeeded were the times I led with love.
This year, I stepped down from co-chairing the ResearchOps Community, a community I loved/love with a passion. The Community saved me these past few years — for how best to receive love than to give it? The many times I doubted myself, there were people who did not doubt me. I don’t yet have the words to describe the gift that is given when your job is to see people. To enable them to light the ways in which they are special, needed, and valued, and how much it makes it also possible to see the same in yourself. I’m naïve enough in this world to not yet understand nor give words to the ways in which this sets us both free — the see’er and the seen. But I do know, for sure, that one of the greatest gifts is to step back and say, ‘you’ve got this, trust yourself’, and watch what grows. The greatest success is to let go, for life to go on without you, and those you love to flourish. Perhaps the word I’m looking for is love.
I got to walk alongside Holly Cole while the Community hosted its first ever ReOps Conference, which was such a fantastic success, and launched a whole bunch of new and existing industry leaders and gave voice to a deepening maturity within the profession of research operations.
I recorded a LOT of podcasts, and was interviewed for a couple as well (a fav was for This is HCD, where we talked for a full two hours, you just get a little bit of our huge conversation!).
I registered a business name, Distaff — so named because distaff is synonymous with ‘women’s work’, and to me, that’s hidden work, which also describes the work I do in research operations, in mentoring and coaching, and training. I did a couple of workshops, and even got to open UX Copenhagen (thank you for believing in me Helle, and letting me take everyone on a tangential wander through how we do change work when everything feels like a bit of a mess!).
I also managed to complete and pass my second milestone of my PhD. thesis (one more to go before the finish line!) in the most ridiculous of circumstances. Somehow, planes not arriving and leaving on time are a blessing when there is a chapter to write :)
It was really a very difficult chapter, as one of the interviews that formed the qualitative part of the data was personally challenging and resulted in many afternoons of rage tweeting about misogyny and unconscious bias. In the end, the chapter became a chapter about transformation theory, interstitial transformation, and organisational change. I learned so much about transformation and did so much transforming this year, I’m not sure grounding was the right word for my 2022 in the end.
It turns out, to transform, one must know where one is going — if not truly, then at least morally, or conceptually, and then that direction needs to be persistent over time. It requires multiple changes, and they all need to be heading in the same direction, more or less. Persistence requires some hefty groundwork, something solid to get one through the really rough times that change initiates. So, alongside grounding, it requires a faith in yourself, and it requires love — love for the future you, the person you’ll construct along the way, and the future you want to make.
I am not the person I was. You are not the person you were.
Our lives have been razed to the ground in so many ways since 2020. All the loss of the past few years has taught me the most unexpected lesson — the world is hard wired for growth, for life, for that continuous layering of lives, lessons, memory.
At the end of 2020 after my mother, sister, and father’s death, I was walking along the road, and I had that most normal of realisations — that I was as inconsequential to the earth, as the leaves in the trees in front of my eyes. If any of you follow me on my Instagram, you’ll know from then, I started to take a lot of photos of myself. There was a time in the past few years, when I wasn’t sure I was even real. Death felt like a constant companion. To convince myself I was alive, I took photo after photo of my skin, my face. My living self. It felt hard to hold on to life when it was taken away so suddenly from so many people I loved.
Sometime in late 2021, I realised that I was also as important to the earth as the leaf, and that this marvellous home we call earth also just wanted me to live. I realised I was safe. Not safe from pain, or hurt, or even death, but safe in my place within this whole beating, living, dying, cycle.
It is an enormous privilege to have any sense of safety. I hesitate to use the word, so very tenuous it is to all but a few of us. The English language fails on so many occasions. I think I mean love? Life, living, is chaotic. To truly live requires a willingness to grow, which requires a willingness to sit in the discomfort of not knowing, and being vulnerable. To sit in discomfort requires a radical acceptance of the consequences of vulnerability, which is of course, pain, hurt, and even death. It is a bargain we make with the world every day, by saying yes to the privilege of being here. In return, we get an earth that wants to sustain us.
Back to that Saturday in December, and the podcast, and Ó Tuama is reading: “Transubstantiation” by Molly McCully Brown. The words match the countryside we’re driving through:
(again, mid poem, apologies)
Cattle pace the distance between road / and gloaming, inexplicably awake. And then, the bathtubs littered in the pasture, / for sale or salvage, or some secret labor stranger than I know. How does it work, / again, the alchemy that shapes them briefly into boats, and then the bones / of great felled beasts, and once more into keening copper bells, before / I even blink?
Half a mile out, the city builds back up along the margin. / Country songs cut in and out of static on the radio. Lord most of what I love / mistakes itself for nothing.”
And there it is. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to say the words right enough to convey how much that tenuousness of life brings such a tenderness to how I feel about the people in my life whom I love. I hope you simply know what I mean.
“Lord, most of what I love mistakes itself for nothing.”
And how much letting go, letting be, trusting, and accepting are all a part of that. And that that is not the same as not growing, not nurturing, not showing up.
My most favourite times of 2022 have been where I had just enough space to be able to lead/begin/centre from love.
- Growing my team at work in size, but also just giving them space and the trust they needed to be those brilliant individuals they each are.
- Beginning, guiding, and walking through the ending of researchers’ time with us at work — finding the special things about each person in our programs of work, and trying my best to make sure our team did the work of noticing those special skills, of noticing when things were hard, when successes and failures happened, and being there with some guidance and support. That was precious. Exit interviews, and tying up governance, honouring the work that’s been done, reflecting and learning from those closures, it’s an extraordinary privilege.
- Doing mentoring and coaching, and being able to listen to a story, and walk back from a future imagined self, to find the steps required to get there, those were the times I felt most alive, and most in my purpose at work.
- At home, being able to see that the easiest way to move forward was to ask, what do you need to be able to live your one wild and precious life? And having enough self-love to be able to see that sometimes, with teens in particular, the answer is not you. That success is to be able to step back and watch someone grow under their own steam. Sometimes in spite of themselves even. That in the end, love is that radical acceptance, and that it looks a lot like trust and letting go.
So, my word for 2023, is love. Yes, I’m forgiving myself my humanity, and trusting in that infinite force that moves us ever towards life, and each of these three words — forgiveness, trust, life — all look a lot like living, beginning everything with a breath, and a lot of love.
There’s joy in the messiness, I hope we can each find it, just a little bit, each and every day. May you have enough space in 2023 to breathe, and to lead with love. May you figure out what you ‘plan to do with your one wild and precious life’.
I’ll continue on my heretical breaking up of poems, with an excerpt from Mary Oliver’s famous, The Summer Day:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
May your new year be warmed by love, may you find the space to love — yourself, and others. May you feel held with love by the earth, may your place in it be one of ease ❤
