survival

When Encouraging Words Are Actually Discouraging

/ Kennedy Farr / Leave a comment

black leaf in sand and gravel beach

Have encouraging words ever served to utterly discourage you?

Like when you are saturated in “Just Keep Breathing” Survival Mode, you can’t look beyond the immediate present moment of “what is.”   And that “what is” just doesn’t feel all that great.  No matter how hard you try to put a positive and enlightened  spin on the situation, life feels like it pretty much sucks.

You are down and feeling like bad karma has taken over your life.  You are in the doldrums and stuck in idle.  Your friends and family know it.  And they feel for you.  They go into Encouragement Mode, or worse yet, Coach Mode, and they offer pep talks, platitudes, and well-intended reality checks.  Their support is so lovely.  You know that they are trying and you appreciate their concern.  But it still feels like the encouraging words actually serve more as a reminder of how bad things are in your life.

If you have been in this place, you know that what you are feeling goes way beyond feeling sorry for yourself.  You aren’t just stuck.  You are buried.

When life isn’t so hot

Not so long ago, I was going through some really challenging financial, emotional, professional, personal, and academic times.  I was going to school full-time, trying to sell the dream home that I had just finished restoring, going through a really yucky break-up, working four ill-suited, part-time jobs, and trying to negotiate house showings with an insane work schedule and three dogs.

I had to rush home from work each time a prospective buying agent called, so that I could take my dogs out for what felt to be marathon walks through the neighborhood while possible buyers viewed the house.  One of the three dogs was enjoying his retirement years and couldn’t really walk very far, so we four would oftentimes go sit on a bus bench up the street to wait out the showing.  Buses would pull up to the stop, mistaking my wave for them to keep going as an invitation to stop. They would pull up and shout at me like I was half a bubble out of plumb, “You can’t bring those dogs on the bus!”  “I know, I know,” I would tell them and wave them on.  The door would hiss shut and the bus would puff off in a plume of exhaust.  All I can say is this was a really low time of my life for me and for my dogs.

When friends think they are helping . . . but they’re not.

I remember the time my friend Mary was going on and on about her three-week vacation on the beaches of Mexico.  I was happy for Mary, but midway through viewing an insanely-long slide show of her pictures, I realized that Mary was the farthest thing from being in tune with me as a friend.  Maybe even as a human being.  I didn’t — and don’t — fault her for any of this (we are still friends) but her parting words that night of “Don’t worry, Dear.  You are going to get through all of this” meant so little to me.  In fact, they only served to discourage me.

It’s the little things . . . and the big things

50 bill.jpgI couldn’t help but think back to my old friend Donnalyn who stopped by my house one day to see me when I wasn’t home.  She left an envelope on my front porch, and in the envelope was $50 cash with a note saying, “I’ve been where you are.  After my divorce, I didn’t think I was going to be able to figure it all out.  You are going to make it.”

Donnalyn.  What an amazing and compassionate and empathizing friend.  And I can’t emphasize this enough: It wasn’t the money.  It could have been $1 or $0, and it would have meant just the same.  Donnalyn understood the struggle.  She had been there.  She knew what Panic Mode felt like in the midst of Survival Mode.  I will never forget her gesture of kindness, generosity, and empathy.

Empathy in action

Thinking about Donnalyn makes me realize that there comes a time when I need to put some action into my words of encouragement.  Saying I love you or You’ve got this is great but being of service is maybe even a little bit better.

It is the Little Things in life and there are so many Little Things that I can do.  Every little thing makes a difference, and the little actions carry a LOT of impact.  Offer your washing machine to a friend whose washer broke down.  Like and share a friend’s new blog to encourage her writing.  Drive a family member to his or her doctor appointment.  Scrub the floors for your sister who is returning from surgery.  Vacuum your partner’s car.  Clean the hideous microwave in the break room.  Help someone figure out how to upload photos to his computer.  Leave a little note of encouragement on the table at the coffee shop for the next person who is going to sit there.

When your new paradigm is Survival Mode

I was talking on the phone with my one of my best friends, Birdie, who is experiencing a major paradigm shift, and I asked her if she ever felt like this.  Birdie just graduated and is starting a new business.  She said the she, too, felt as if her life is in Survival Mode while she gets everything up and running.

Birdie told me, “People have been so nice, but I sometimes feel unworthy of the encouragement.  I don’t feel like I have the resources to take them up on their advice — which is all really good — and make things happen, so it sometimes feel like I am wasting other people’s energy when they are being so encouraging.”

This is so honest.  It made me think back to my Epic Life Meltdown and how I felt exactly the same as her.  Birdie’s words really resonate with me.  There is a difference between feeling sorry for yourself and Real.  Birdie’s experience is Real.  She knows that, ultimately, she is going to build her practice and that some of the bumps are eventually going to smooth out . . . but in the meantime?  I try to listen, and we do fun things together.  It’s the little things.  I think of Donnalyn and her $50, and I try to transfer that same $50-intention into Real for someone else.  I knew that my Birdie’s phone was no longer holding a charge, so I ordered her a new battery on Amazon and had it shipped to her house.  Once her phone was all charged up with the new battery, she called me.  She laughed and said that it has made such a difference not having to conduct business while being plugged into the wall.

No one will know unless you share.

And on the other side of this . . . tell people how they can help you.  You don’t have to go on a marathon downward spiral about how broke you are or how awful your relationship is in order to convey what is going on.  Sometimes we are admonished by the positive intenders in our lives saying that we need to stay away from negative talk . . . but how can people help if we don’t share our Real?

As for that crazy Survival-Mode scenario in the past . . . Well, the house sold, I graduated, I ultimately embraced the release of a bad relationship, I gradually let go of each job in lieu of one single job with the standard benefits, and I started to catch a rhythm of sorts.  I started to play music again and the dogs, as they always do, adapted happily to their new home.  No more marathon walks for lovely old Mac!   I was able to breathe a bit more easily within my Real, which was no longer hitting the door to my soul with a SWAT team’s battering ram.

The funny part: That was then.  This is now. Life took yet another epic turn, by my choosing, and I am reconstructing several pieces that have flown off the proverbial bus.  I am using baling wire, paper clips, and duct tape to keep things running, but I am getting there.  I have come to learn that I am pretty good at making the best with what I have on hand.  And there is nothing wrong with that.

How about you?  Are you in Survival Mode?

  • Share your situation with someone who you can trust to really listen.  Ask for input as to what he or she is hearing you say.
  • Reframe your feelings with new words that steer you in a more positive direction.  Even if you have to stretch the truth of your reality a bit, use words that set your thinking in a new light of positivity.  Not always easy, I know.
  • Keep your heart open to friends, family, and colleagues who might be struggling.  Give them a hug.  Ask them how they are doing.  Listen.
  • Take action — for others and for yourself.  Look for ways to surprise and delight someone who is feeling a burden.  Remember, it’s the little and the big things.
  • Be kind.  Be positive.  Be hopeful.  Know that, like an EKG line, life has its ups and its downs.  No one wants to live on a flat line.
  • Go with the flow and smile.  Looking for the happy in life is a lot more fun than accepting the overwhelm.

Author bio: Kennedy Farr’s passion for writing caught light at the age of four when she first learned how to spell her name at a yellow kitchen table on a sheet of lined tablet paper.  Kennedy is a daily writer and blogger, a lifelong learner, and a true believer that something wonderful is happening right now in this very moment.  Kennedy lives high on the mountainside of an emerald-green island in the Pacific Northwest.

Website: https://theunseenwordsproject.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/theunseenwords

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/The-Unseen-Words-Project-1095815913825818/ 

 

 

 

 

The Forest of Symbols

/ Kennedy Farr / 3 Comments

I love spending time on my back deck in the summertime.  Love it.  It has grown to be the sanctuary that I have always longed to create.  This makes me feel immeasurably happy.  Trees, starshine, relative quiet, begonias and ivy spilling out of pots.  Dinner served on oddball china accompanied by a glass of wine and excellent company in the day’s gloaming.  These things create a balance within.  I value it very much.

Beneath my deck is a fairly sharp drop-off into the ravine below.  At the foot of the ravine is a creek.  Although I cannot see the creek from my house, I can hear it burbling in the summer and rushing in the spring.

There are two maple trees that grow almost directly beneath my deck.  They arc out and away to clear the overhang of the deck, and they then bump right up against the railing in their quest for sunlight.

There is dense forest to the east so the sunrise is diffused and scanty.  To the west?  The house stands.  To the north and south?  My neighbors.  The sunlight?  A tight arc overhead.  Sunlight is a rare and divine commodity.  And these amazingly resilient maple trees keep overtaking all sun rights.

I dutifully trim each tree back each summer, so that I can maintain one roving and solitary sun spot on my deck at high noon.  I used to feel a distinct unease in my stomach when I trimmed these trees back.  They work so hard.  I look down at their beginnings . . . their roots . . . tucked beneath the deck, and I marvel.  These trees maintain an impressive will to survive.  I honor this and want it to be duly recognized.

Still . . . the sunshine is such a rare thing in the midst of the forest . . .

Survival.  Such a strong word . . . the state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances (“Google define:”)  Thinking about struggling tree seedlings in the dark underbelly of my deck could be considered to be difficult circumstances.  And lest I go too far and appear to be anthropomorphising a maple tree . . . I do acknowledge that what may seem dark and uninviting to me might pose as ideal growing conditions for a maple seedling.  It’s possible.

Still, the sunlight.  There is always the need for that.

Coincidence-FateAn accident?  I am not so sure about the word accident.  An accident poses so many debatable thoughts concerning its reality.  Do you believe in coincidence?  I do.  And I don’t.  I prefer to think in terms of “natural order” . . . that I am following a natural order that is designed as a result of the deliberate and spontaneous choices that I make.   I do somewhat embrace the notion of fate or destiny; still, I do believe that we are all capable of steering our lives into states of “coincidence” that override all of the imaginings that we could and can concoct.

Coincidence.  One never knows when a Miracle is going to line up ahead of you and then turn around and say hello.  toaster oven

Robert Moss in his awesome book The Three “Only” Things writes about coincidence.  Moss writes:

“Everything that enters our field of perception means something, large or small. Everything speaks to us, if we will take off our headphones and hear a different sound track. Everything corresponds. We travel better in the forest of symbols when we are open and available to all the forms of meaning that are watching and waiting for us.”
― Robert Moss, The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination

“The forest of symbols”:  lovelovelove this.  The vastly precocious meaning of these symbols.

The summer when I was reading Moss’ book . . . Wow!  But was I paying attention!  To the largest and smallest of things.  Dragonflies performing a skittering and buzzing ballet against a blue sky.  Scratched up pennies on the sidewalk.  Cloud patterns.  Bottle caps in the gutters.  Bees dancing around blossoms.  A message scrawled across the back of a coaster in a bar.  A Lego man forgotten in the grass after a foot-stomping outdoor concert.  All of these crazy and amazing symbols were presenting themselves from all angles of the forest.  I was listening, watching, thinking, wondering, journaling, creating.

I remember this summer like no other.  Why?  I was paying attention.  I honored coincidence as the harbinger of amazinglifeforce.  The stories I created in my journaling that summer were quite fanciful actually.  I saw all of these symbols as positive omens for an ultimate outcome that would be blissful.  And happy.  And rewarding.  It felt so great.

I see now that “the forest of symbols” were there for everyone else to see, too.  It was how I was perceiving these things that proved unique to me . . . to what it was that I believed would make for a fulfilling life.  I was seeking an apex to my compilation of coincidence.  I wanted to believe that seeing 4 people walk past me within half an hour and all wearing orange t-shirts meant something.  Pay no mind to the fact that there was road work being conducted on the street above my point of musing.  Those 4 orange t-shirts were all  harbingers of good things to come.  I was paying attention.

happinessI know why I loved that summer.  It was because I allowed myself the trajectory of fancy that dreaming allows.  My journaling put my thoughts of positivity onto tangible pieces of paper in a now-dog-eared spiral notebook.  I glanced through this journal just this past weekend.  It is written in a curious code that can only be understood by me.  I continue to maintain contact with the dreamer within who wrote all of those optimistic thoughts.  I was going somewhere that summer.  I just didn’t know where or when.  But I knew why.  I wanted to find a perfect center of bliss in my life.

I digress.  Those two maple trees.  Sun survival.  I generally allow them to grow 6 feet or so above the railing — which doesn’t take long. The loppers come out of obscurity and then my sun spot returns to me — my small roving spotlight of vitamin D.  Last weekend I gave each tree a haircut at slightly above deck-railing height, knowing that we both want to grow in the same spot.

I am a careful pruner.  I went online and read up on best practices for tree pruning.  I mean no harm and intend no long-lasting damage.  I honor the growth and the spirit in these trees that some folk in this part of the world regard as “weed trees.”  These trees remind me to pay attention.  Sunlight can be lost, but it can be regained.  The planet keeps spinning and we — the trees and I — keep growing and stretching for more.  We attain.  We share space and light.

I love my back deck.  This summer, the rewards of all of that positivity from several summers ago have come to fruition.  I was a believer when I was spinning my “coincidental” symbols into pure sweetness.  And light.

“Everything . . . means something . . . everything speaks to us  . . . everything corresponds . . .”  I hold this thought as I sit here on the back deck and tap away on the keyboard.  I remain ever “open and available to all the forms of meaning that are watching and waiting for [me].”  I am paying attention.