What can we learn from Katy?

While I was being all weak and feeble and ill last weekend, I re-read an old childhood favourite: What Katy Did.

Ah, Katy: what memories you brought back to me! That brood of noisy brothers and sisters, bossy Aunt Izzie with her heart of gold, saintly Cousin Helen, dear hard-working Papa.

Katy is an old-fashioned morality tale in which the headstrong child we first meet is tamed by illness. She becomes a loving, well-behaved and polished young lady, the apple of her father’s eye.

It’s a very dated book (and a feminist nightmare!) but for me at least it retains much of its charm. So what can we learn from Katy’s story?

Don’t leave things until the last minute

When we first meet her, Katy is forever late, stressed and getting into scrapes because she’s careless and because she leaves everything to the last minute. Bonnets fly off, slates get broken, feet fall over undone bootlaces. This makes her life more complicated and less fun than it would be otherwise.

Don’t make assumptions about other people’s motives

Katy assumes that Aunt Izzie is simply being mean in forbidding the children to use the new swing in the woodshed. So Katy defiantly swings to the rafters. The swing breaks, she falls and is so badly injured that she’s bedridden for four years. It turns out Aunt Izzie knew the swing needed mending, which is why she forbade the children to use it.

Not making a choice is choosing

So 12-year-old Katy becomes an invalid and lies all day in a mess of darkness, frowsy hair, old medicine bottles and self-pity. She thinks she has no choices left. It isn’t until Cousin Helen comes along and encourages Katy to let the sunshine in, make her room pretty and brush her hair that Katy realises she doesn’t have to let life just pass her by, she can choose to engage in it even from her sick-bed.

What were your favourite childhood stories, and what lessons would you take them?

Leap Day

Now traditionally what this means is that us poor humble little women may take the initiative and propose marriage to men… But I propose not marriage but something rather different for all us cackling crones!

Let’s take that extra day, the Leap Day, the 29th February, and plan something special for it. Something scary. Let’s remove the safety nets from our lives. On that day, let’s leap.

Think of something you’ve wanted to do for a long time. Big, small, sensible, silly: it doesn’t matter. It just has to be something that gets you waaaay outside your comfort zone.

Don’t judge yourself. Something you find scary will be daily fare to another. A bold person’s challenge may be to become vulnerable and quiet. Just as difficult as an introvert taking an improv class.

On or near 29 February

Now a couple of you contacted me after the newsletter to say what you want to do won’t be possible on the actual 29th. So that’s fine – it’s more important to stick to the spirit of the Leap than the actual date. So arrange whatever it is for some time between now and the 1st March.

Get ready…

So make your plans, make any arrangements you need to, and off you go. Stand on that cliff edge, whether it be an actual marriage proposal or an actual cliff, aaaaaannnnnddddd….. LEAP!!

Then share

Oh look of course if what you’ve done is so private you can’t share it then that’s wonderful, and I wish you joy of it. And if you can, I would absolutely love it if you came back here next Friday, 2nd March.

Because this is how it’s going to work: on Friday 2nd I’ll publish a short blog post telling you what I did, and invite you to link either to your own post describing your Leap Adventure, or to share in the comments.

I suspect that between us all, we’ll have some brave and interesting stories to tell, so please Leap and tell!

And if there’s someone else you think might be intrigued by this idea, do please point them in this direction.

Happy Leaping!

photo credit: blueyeda73

My writing schedule here at Pilgrim’s Moon is one post on Tuesday and one on Friday. It gives me a structure which keeps my procrastination tendencies at bay.

And for today’s piece, I had something good up my sleeve. But life has intervened. I have a bug. One of those horrible cold/flu bugs. You know the kind of thing: scratchy throat, blocked nose, coughing, aching limbs and head, temperature, dizziness, cotton-wool brains.

Now normally I’d fight through and try to carry on as if nothing had happened, but today I decided to take my own advice, allow myself to be vulnerable, shift down a gear, and be gentle with myself. I didn’t go to work, and your blog post today, dear reader, is just these three paragraphs. Finished. I trust I’ll be back with everything in working order next week!

I wish you shelter from the storm,
A cosy fire to keep you warm,
But most of all, when snowflakes fall
I wish you love.

Music Leo Chauliac, English lyrics Albert A Beach
Sung beautifully here by Blossom Dearie 

It wouldn’t be Valentine’s Day if we didn’t think about love, would it?

And I’m thinking not only of romantic love, but all kinds of love.

We love our children and grandchildren. We love our families, whether those of blood or the closer ties of deliberate deep friendship. We love the animal friends in our lives. We love music, art, words and beauty. We love whatever we think of as the divine.

But not inevitably.

Love is a choice

Love is a choice and sometimes the choice can be too scary for us to make.

Love makes us vulnerable. It makes us vulnerable to loss, to making fools of ourselves, to fear, to searing empathy.

So in wishing you, and myself, love, it’s a big and difficult wish I’m sending. But the alternative wraps us in a hard cynical shell from which it can become impossible to break free. And I definitely don’t wish you that.

So I wish you love, and I include in that love for your wonderful self, which can be easy to overlook. Let’s celebrate love, of all kinds.

dapper gents from 1903

I’ve long held the view that when men dress well (which I admit can be unusual), they are light years ahead of the average woman in terms of style. Why? Because despite changes in social norms and the rise of the metrosexual, men’s clothing still abides by stricter rules and expectations than that of women.

Think about it: it’s perfectly acceptable for women to wear heels or flats, anything from jeans to Hillary Clinton-style pantsuits to skirts or dresses of any length, with shirts, blouses or tops of every style, all in an endless array of shapes, colours, patterns and fabrics. The result is often a chaotic lack of style.

Men, on the other hand, work within a much narrower framework. They are forced to use imagination. Perhaps a man might express his style in the width of a lapel, the subtle layering of different shades of blue in pattern, texture and fabric, the flash of vibrant colour from an orange leather belt. When they get it right, men’s clothing is multi-faceted and really stylish.

Dealing with distractions

So what does this have to do with anything?

Too much choice can sometimes blind us to the most imaginative choice, or to the choice that’s right for us. And the sheer volume of information and distractions can stop us living our real lives and reaching our goals. In the face of such volume of possibility, we can actually freeze up and despair.

So how do we discover the best choice for us, manage the distractions, and live the lives we want?

Coaching is an excellent, proven option, tailored to the individual, but it costs money that not everyone has.

What’s an accountability ally?

photo credit: arbron

Another possibility is to work with an accountability ally.

This is a friend or acquaintance with whom you’ll work for a specific period, no exchange of money involved. You’ll share dreams, wishes, goals and, most importantly, the steps you will take towards your goals. You’ll share commitment.

It’s an equal relationship in which you hold each other accountable for the progress you’ll make.

Ten steps to making it work

Here’s how it works:

1. Find your ally. It can be a good friend but there’s a lot to be said for working with someone you don’t know intimately. It can make for a more objective relationship. It has to be someone you can trust totally to keep your confidentiality.
2. Agree the length of time you’ll work together. Three or four months is probably the minimum commitment to effect real change.
3. You begin with some solo work: you’ll each write down up to five things you want to accomplish. Maybe you want to start a business, get fitter, learn French. Break each one down into manageable chunks and work out a realistic schedule for when you can carry out each chunk. Remember: you’re going to commit to this and have another person hold you accountable. Once you have a written plan and schedule, share it with each other.
4. Now the fun starts! You’re going to have regular conversations with your partner and during those conversations you’ll describe the progress you’ve made since the last time you spoke. And vice versa.
5. Agree how often you’ll speak. Some people check in once a day for ten minutes, others once a week for an hour. Anything less frequently than once a week will slow your momentum. (Other world-class procrastinators will identify with my belief that I can catch up with everything I’ve put off for a month in just half an hour.) Most people speak by phone and if possible meet face-to-face occasionally. But with Skype, there’s nothing to prevent you having an accountability ally anywhere in the world.
6. Do use voice as your main communication by the way. Follow up with email, messaging or whatever, but there’s nothing like hearing your own voice describe what you have or haven’t done to bring home your progress or lack of it. And your partner can ask questions on the spot.
7. During your calls, divide your time exactly in half and take it in turns to start. Set a timer so you know when it’s the other person’s turn.
8. When it’s your turn to listen, do just that. Ask probing questions if your partner hasn’t done something they’d committed to, but be brief, calm, and compassionate. And this exercise isn’t conversational, it’s functional. For example your partner says something didn’t happen as expected: this is not your cue to launch into “Yes, I remember when the same thing happened to me back in 1975…”!
9. When it’s your turn to talk, be honest and straightforward.
10. Agree to mutual celebrations as you reach your goals. If you’re able to meet up, go out for a delicious meal. If not you’ll have to be more imaginative, but it’s really important to acknowledge and celebrate your progress.

So that’s it, how to work with an accountability ally. I’d love to know what you think, whether you’ve done this before or plan to.

image credit: alice popkorn

A reader contacted me over the weekend asking for more information about the Enneagram (pronounced any-a-gram), which I mentioned briefly in my last post.

What is the Enneagram?

I explained that the Enneagram (which I teach) is at best a profound tool for personal and spiritual transformation and at worst, a parlour game in which we try to fit ourselves and others into narrow and stereotypical definitions of personality.

Which is probably a rather unhelpful answer! Because what is it?

Ancient roots, modern wisdom

A number of ancient wisdom traditions gave rise in the mid-20th Century to the development of a psychological system which describes nine “personality types” each with a distinct pattern of characteristics and a distinct way of seeing the world.

Put like this it seems both crude and implausible. How can all of humanity be distilled into only nine types. Well how can one brief explanation encompass all the subtleties of this way of exploring our inner worlds which thousands find invaluable? It can’t.

And what I’m writing today doesn’t try to explain the details of the Enneagram itself.

What’s the point?

What really interests me is the seeking itself, this hunger that comes upon as at certain times of our lives to explore our inner worlds and begin to understand the fullness of our humanity.

It doesn’t actually matter what methods we use. Perhaps we use the Enneagram, Myers Briggs, prayer, meditation, counselling, journalling, yoga. There’s a saying:

When the sage points to the moon, the fool looks at the finger

I think the mechanisms by which we gain inner understanding are the finger.

(Re)gaining humanity

Every missing piece of the puzzle that comprises our individual and collective humanity is like a word missing from our vocabulary. Without it we are unable fully to express the concept it describes.

Which is why I believe these fingers pointing, these methods that aid understanding, are so important. Not which method, just that we use one to begin or continue the exploration.

I believe it’s only by doing our inner work of transformation that we regain our humanity.

How do you go about understanding your inner life?

photo credit: greg hume

There’s a passage in Jean Shinoda Bolen’s excellent book Gather the Women, Save the World in which she talks about the little-known bonobo ape.

Like chimpanzees, bonobos share 98% of their DNA with us humans, but unlike the male-dominated, warlike chimpanzee, bonobos would rather make love than war and are female-dominated, although this domination is lightly held.

De Waal [an expert on primates] describes female bonobos as forming “constructed sisterhoods” which gives them an edge over males because they stick up for one another. If a male acts aggressively toward a female, other females will come to her aid. He speculates that it could be that female alliances arose to prevent infanticide by males, which is common among chimpanzees and other species, but has never been observed among the bonobos. Females form strong alliances with other unrelated females. Bonobo adolescent females disperse, which prevents incest. In effect, they leave home, move to a new community, make new friends and become part of a sisterhood.

Sisterhood

Ah, sisterhood! Many of you reading this will remember the heady days of second-wave feminism in the early ’70s, forming consciousness-raising groups, reinventing the definition of friendship.

Of course a lot of that optimism and radical spirit has faded. For many of us, feminism became more about equal rights with men (and the opportunity to work ourselves to death alongside them) than about fundamental change in society. And to some extent the movement disintegrated in political disagreement.

A word about men

When I was first thinking about setting up this site, I considered briefly whether I should design it to appeal to everyone on the aging journey. I decided not to because I don’t know the male experience. I believe there are, at this point in our evolution, enough gender differences that men have to speak of their own experience. (Richard Rohr does this brilliantly, I’m told, in his Men as Elders and Learners program.)

Sisterhood revisited

Of course the biological accident of being female doesn’t automatically make us understand each other. And there are those for whom being female is choice, not biology.

Women are different as much as we’re the same, and my work with the Enneagram system of personal and spiritual growth has shown me we see the world through very different lenses. And we’re not all naturally nurturing earth mothers.

Nonetheless I do think that on the deepest levels, there’s a fundamental current of understanding that runs between us.

“Consciousness-raising” updated

So I want your help. I’m interested in the ways women gather together today. Obviously we have this blessed option of sharing across boundaries in online groups, but what about our physical worlds?

For example, I’m a member of a women’s interfaith group and a women’s reading group. What groups do you belong to if any? How can we make like the bonobos and form strong bonds of sisterhood today, in a world which so badly needs the advantage of the elderwoman’s wisdom?

“Constructed sisterhood”: please share ideas in the comments.

photo credit: horia varlan

To what extent are we in control of our own lives and destinies?

There’s an old saying “We plan, God laughs”.

Whose fault?

Last week I shared a captioned picture on Facebook. It’s the blue one a few paragraphs down, with images of two women.

When I first came across it, something about it made me uneasy. At first I thought it was the aesthetics: it isn’t very attractive.

Then I started considering what it was actually saying.

Is it the fault of the woman on the left that she is disabled? Do we know anything about her life and it’s circumstances?

What do we know about the woman on the right? Maybe she’s a rich widow with a personal trainer and her own pool.

What people thought

Eventually, I shared the picture on Facebook without comment, wondering how people would react. It obviously hit a nerve, there were a lot really interesting and thoughtful comments, most along the lines of this from Alison Wiley:

I can appreciate that we should proactively pursue our health. (And I do.) I’m uncomfortable, though, with the implication that the woman on the left must have done a series of wrong things. She might not have. It’s not a 1:1 relationship between personal choices and personal health.

So…

Is infirmity our fault?

No of course not.

People are visited by all kinds of accidents and illnesses. Many of us have watched the slow and terrible decline of a loved one to Alzheimers’ and other conditions. Some of you live with chronic pain and illness.

And yet…

There are many things we can do to live healthier lives. We all know what they are.

I believe passionately that our small choices are transformational. If my future holds a disabling accident or similar, that’s something I’ll have to try to live and die with. But if my future holds a disabling illness which is a direct result of my personal habits, that’s squarely my fault.

What do you think?

photo credit: sarah g

Perhaps you’re on Facebook or Twitter or Google+ or LinkedIn or all of them and more. Perhaps you’re not on any social network at all and can’t see the point. Perhaps you don’t know what the hell a social network is (click here!).

Are you visual?

If you’re overcommitted and feel like you’re going under for the third time because there’s just so much out there online, you may think I’m completely crazy to suggest you get involved in yet another social network.

But if you’re a visual person I am suggesting exactly that.

Pinterest

After hearing about it but resisting for weeks, I’ve just joined Pinterest. And I love it.

What is it? An online pinboard onto which you can pin any image around the web that inspires you or takes your fancy. Or upload your own images (great for the artists among you!) You can follow others and see what they like, so you get a wonderful cross-fertilisation of visual ideas and styles.

You can set up several different pinboards to group your topics together. For example when you’re decorating your living room and trying to remember that great colour combination you spotted a few weeks back, it’s right there on your “Home ideas” pinboard.

Or if you’re a photographer and get inspired by, say, trees, you can collect a glorious collage of tree images to inspire you.

Female

Another thing that might grab your attention about Pinterest is that unlike almost every other social media site, its membership demographic is currently overwhelmingly female. Eighty percent female to male in fact, and age range mostly in the 25 to 54 bracket. In other words this isn’t a site for teenage male geeks (although of course we love ‘em!).

Tutorial

Using Pinterest is really pretty intuitive, but if you’d like a tutorial, there’s a good one at BlogHer – click here.

Are you already on Pinterest?

My own Pinterest pinboards are still in a fairly embryonic state as I sort out categories and cherry-pick images. But of course I’d love for you to check them out. Click here to find me on Pinterest.

If you’re there too, please leave a link to your boards in the comments: I’d be really interested to follow you and see what’s grabbing your attention.

photo credit: stevie rocco

Like Miss Marple, I enjoy knitting. I’m not very fast at it, but there’s something about the clacking of those needles and the making of something real out of yarn and two sticks that feels meditative, creative and productive.

And knitting is a good metaphor for life, isn’t it? We take the thread of our gifts, potential and circumstances, and we knit it into the garment of our lives. The question is what kind of lives do we knit? Are they lumpy and off-kilter or smooth and shapely?

If you think the “right” answer is smooth and shapely, you’d be wrong.

There are stories from around the world about deliberate mistakes introduced by craftspeople into their work, Navajo weavers and Amish quilters among them. But these are mistakes introduced by master craftspeople, the idea being that a mistake is an aid to humility by reinforcing that they are not perfect.

Our lumpy lives are more like those moments when, perhaps as children, we’re learning a new skill and we get so frustrated and angry with our lack of progress that we throw the knitting, the sewing or whatever across the room. Our mistakes are organic, not deliberate.

And that’s as it should be.

One day as a little girl I learned how to do cross-stitch. My auntie taught me. I remember a white cloth, bright blue thread and what seemed to me a very large needle. I sat with my tongue sticking out of the corner of my mouth, concentrating fiercely, staining that white cloth with the grubby fingers I’d forgotten to wash after coming in from the garden. I was so proud when I managed a whole row of crooked little blue crosses along the by-now grimy cloth.

I’ve never done cross-stitch from that day to this, but I remember that glorious imperfection very well – to me it was a wonderful achievement.

And now I’m much older and there’s more knitting hanging down from my needles than there is to come, I realise that the very best mistakes are made because we’re not afraid to try something new.

It doesn’t matter how lumpy the knitting of your life is, it still makes a unique and beautiful pattern, don’t you think?

Many thanks to new reader Maria, whose post Learning an Old Skill at her lovely blog A Moment in My Day set off this train of thought.