This is the season for graduations. I am amused that it’s called commencement, as if all of the work that went before came before the beginning. My friend, and former colleague, Nancy, called her retirement, commencement. That’s probably a healthy way to look your work life as a preamble to what comes next.

‘OK, what’s next?’ was what my oldest niece placed on her mortarboard for her commencement exercises. It’s a homage to the TV series ‘West Wing’ and the oft-said phrase by President Jeb Bartlet. It’s a good phrase for someone that has completed her nursing degree program and is looking forward to what comes next. And what comes next is more education, a continuous process in medicine, no matter what part you practice.

I think it’s interesting that we add the word ‘exercise’ to the commencement. I suppose exercise might refer to the fact that commencement recurs on a periodic basis, just like physical exercise is repeated again and again.

Commencement exercises reminds me that all that came before prepares you for now, and next. And that tomorrow we repeat the process, a new now, and a new next.

So, Congratulations to all the graduates! You worked hard, and for now, you’ve completed something. Tomorrow, there will be the next. And special congratulations to my niece, Tamar, and for all the new beginnings that come to you.

There’s a poem that I keep coming back to. You have those days, I imagine. The to-do list keeps getting longer the more you things you tick off. The calendar balloons to fill those gaps that you left just for yourself. Where the unplanned writes over the planned. When it just all seems like too much.

That’s when I seek out my guide star. My guide star poem is Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese. I’ll share a link to it, as it just seems like infringement to share the poem here. http://gwenglish.blogspot.com/2014/04/poem-of-day-mary-olivers-wild-geese.html

The two opening lines reject the idea that you have to be good, or you need to repent.
The third line is truth: You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

That’s all I have to do – to-do list be damned.

She then speaks to the mutual sharing of despair. When you’re sensitive like me, the world seems so cruel. The sharing of what pains you, or what pains me, lessens the pain.

And then Mary Oliver turns to the meanwhile. Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the wild geese are heading home again.

And the last line:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

My mental addition after ‘no matter how lonely’, no matter how sad, no matter how depressed, no matter how glad, …announcing your place in the family of things.

About three weeks ago, I burned my right thumb with a heat gun. I burned it near the knuckle, and at the time I did it, I thought it wasn’t so bad and kept working on my task. A few minutes later, I put my thumb into ice water and I wished I would have done that sooner. It was pretty clear to me that it was a second degree burn. Fortunately, I’m left-handed but I use both hands equally as well. It went from painful to very sensitive to ‘it still hurts’ and now it just feels weird.

Last week, I read an article that a friend from my former workplace. She wrote about how exhausting it was being with a lot of people, and mentioned her Myers-Briggs personality type. Now, I don’t need a test to know that I’m introverted, caring, kind, intelligent, observant with a side of detachment. I don’t need a test to know where my gifts are, nor where my weaknesses are. I completely identify that, for me, being with a large group of people is exhausting. Still, it got me thinking about the job that I retired from about five years ago, a job that I held since, and the job I held before.

I started my first job in broadcasting about forty years ago. For the most part it was fabulous. The hardest part was it was a full-time job that was really two part-time jobs glued together. My managers were awesome, Art Timko especially so. When you are treated as a human being, with care and trust, by someone that really wants the best for you even when it means letting you go – well, it doesn’t get better than that. And sadly, it never got better than that. That radio station was a family, who worked their butts off because of the support we received from Art and from each other. There was a free flow of communication. I didn’t know how special that place was until I left.

The next job was just one job, full-time, and it paid considerably more. And it was fine, at first. And there seemed to be a sense of community, for awhile anyway. But under the surface, there was deceit and distrust. The basic management style was to hold on to information, to manipulate, and those that worked their butts off were exploited until they finally learned that your effort meant little to those in charge. We went from lean and mean, to just plain mean. Don’t get me wrong, there were people that cared and supported each other, and I counted them as friends. They were my colleagues. Management, not so much.

I hung in there. I served on a mission and goals team, suggested improvements, and almost all of that work went unheeded. When my children were small, I was told that my first priority was to the station. But my first priority was to my family, and from there the internal conflict began.

There was my first major depressive episode that I sought treatment. It was brought on by that internal conflict, too much work, from broken trust and some other stuff I won’t talk about here. I stopped working for a few weeks while to get away from dangerous choices, and healed enough to go back. I had thought that this was situational depression, and if I quit and went somewhere else, I would not learn to cope and I’d probably bring it with me to the next job. People from work seemed, on a whole, to be a threat to my well-being. We didn’t want any contact from work until I was well enough to go back. I don’t know if that was disseminated from management to the rest of the staff, my suspicion (from the experience that managers used information as power) is that very little was shared. There were a few people that stayed in touch, not because they couldn’t follow ‘rules’ but because they cared a lot about me, and they knew the workplace wasn’t very healthy, and were highly sensitive to the dysfunctional situation.

I went back to work, wary and cautious. I mainly kept to myself, steeling myself before going in, focusing on my work, getting it done and getting away. I had just started graduate school, too, but that was fulfilling and enjoyable. Over time, the work budgets got even tighter, and people that retired were simply not replaced. This caused a lot of stress for me as it really meant I was on-call virtually all the time. I wanted to quit, but I stayed with it because my family needed my benefits and my earnings. I kept at it for another twenty years. Towards the end, I don’t think I was very kind or caring to my colleagues (sorry, my friends – I was in full-on survival mode).

What does this all have to do with a second degree burn? If I match up the burn with the major depression, then the recovery from each was painful, then very sensitive, to ‘it still hurts’. In a week or two from now, the burn I experienced will be gone except for a little discoloration. Twenty-five years on from that episode of major depression, I went through to ‘it just feels weird’ and back to somewhere around very sensitive or ‘it still hurts’. Maybe another year or so, it’ll get better. It’s really clear to me now that I trend towards depression when stressed or in conflict. The best thing for me is to move on, and let go. I know this, but what I really want to do is fix it.

If anyone from my former workplace is reading this, I feel badly that I was less than kind, or focused more on getting the job done and moving on to the next thing. You really have no idea what I was dealing with, or how painful it was to re-open a wound last year that was unhealed from 25 years ago.

 

I’ve been walking in my neighborhood a lot lately. We have a miniature poodle that loves his walkies, and when it’s not pouring down rain, he usually is walked three times a day for a half hour or so.

I get bored if we take the same route every time, and he seems to enjoy the novelty of a new route.

One route we take is along Cedarbrook, where I spotted a pair of baby footprints. There’s something about wanting to capture and make permanent a moment of time when our babies are small. We did the same thing, pressing our elementary school aged children’s feet into wet concrete. (Sadly, the section of concrete in our front walk was demolished when our lead water service line was replaced).

Every time I walk past these footprints, I find myself wondering about that child. Where are they now? What are they doing? What sort of childhood did they have? What issues did they overcome growing up? Have they graduated college yet? Are they happy? One thing our city requires is a stamp with the year, and the concrete firm’s name in the freshly placed concrete. Walking through the neighborhood, I get see a variety of dates, from fairly recent to older than I am. The concrete where the baby footprints are dated 1998. We’re twenty years on from then at this writing.

At the same time that I’m thinking about that anonymous baby’s feet being pressed into fresh concrete, I’m reflecting back on 1998. That was the year that I had a study abroad class in France, and we, as a family, spent 7 weeks overseas. That was the year when we spent a week in Cornwall, and where I found a sense of ‘homecoming’ in that land where I had never been, but was connected to through my grandfather, and his kin. That was the year where the World Cup was held in France, and France was victorious. That was the year where we saw what high security looked like: gendarmes with automatic rifles held at the ready when we entered France by ferry, teams of similarly armed soldiers in the Metro, on the streets. We rarely see our police forces armed like that, though we do see civilians armed with semi-automatic assault rifles playing at being a security force, but generally just terrorizing us unarmed folk.

What kind of a world have we created? Not a very good one, in my opinion. Those tiny feet, pressed into the cool, uncured, concrete. We’ve given you a country that has been at war for almost your entire life. We’ve given you a country where unarmed black men can be gunned down by police without justice. We’ve given you a country where sexual assault survivors are disbelieved, and perpetrators are protected. We’ve given you a massive mess that too few are trying to clean up. Anonymous baby of 1998, I’m sorry that the world, the country, the state, and this city is so broken. I sincerely hope you have the ability to fix all this.

I’m going to feature some of my photography, poetry and prose, along with some quotations from my favorite word artists. You’ll read some of my thoughts and reflections on being a sensitive person in the world of today.

As you start to walk out on the way, the way appears. — Rumi