Authenticity: Finding Our Way Back When We Lose Our Center
Authenticity: Finding Our Way Back When We Lose Our Center
This beautiful roller coaster that we call “life” can take us on so many twists and turns that somehow we can lose our sense of orientation. This journey is truly manic in many ways because we can be taken on exceptional highs and then experience the most difficult of circumstances, depending upon our set of experiences and our reactions.
At times the jostling about can become too much for our mind, body, and soul to process. We can lose our way and become off-kilter with varying degrees of impact. Sometimes this veering off of our previous course can occur surreptitiously, without loud and clear fanfare. We look up one day and we feel as if we are swimming in a lake for which we can see neither the bottom nor the shores. It can be very alarming and disconcerting in the least.
My beloved Mother fought multiple sclerosis for almost 30 years. She was the model patient—even leading support groups for her neurologist. She took a fall while walking that she characterized as unlike her other neurological incidents related to her MS. We believed that she could fight off almost any ailment. After all, she had fought off pre-cancer, breast cancer, and a brain cyst that couldn’t be completely removed that almost killed her.
Mother’s health quickly degraded, and after many hospitalizations and two stays in skilled nursing facilities, we brought her home to honor her wish to live out her final days in the house that she bought on her own—at 62, after three divorces. We called in the ministers to commune with her. We played Mahalia Jackson singing, “The Upper Room” and Louis Armstrong playing what I told her was her Second Line (New Orleans funeral procession from her Louisiana heritage) as he sang, “When the Saints Go Marching In”. We were there when she took her last breath. We watched over her as the funeral home attendants wrapped her body in a sheet and in placed her gingerly in a body bag and carried her out to the waiting hearse. We stood in the doorway on that cold January morning before dawn and watched as they took away our anchor.
Death is a ritual that happens all of the time around us. But it doesn’t seem to happen to us while we watch once or twice removed. But when it is your beloved parent, there is a psychic shift that happens that can be neither fathomed nor explained.
I had been running my consulting practice for 13 years when Mom’s health began rapidly deteriorating. I felt suddenly overwhelmed and stretched to my most fragile self. We fought to understand Mom’s medical travails (as did the doctors), and then we fought to save her. She taught us to be warriors and we put on our shields and grabbed our swords to save our beloved. But we couldn’t stop the rapid and unexpected deterioration of my Mother’s central nervous system. It had been through too much trauma in her 80 years.
My Mother taught me to fight. She taught me to survive. She taught me to ignore all threats and challenges in pursuit of my goals. But I couldn’t save her. In retrospect, I now see that I felt as though I had failed her. I couldn’t stop death’s encroachment.
Much to my Mother’s dismay, I have always been more comfortable in my head (my intellect) than in my heart (feelings). I have been able to analyze most situations in my life and to triumph. But this was one of those turns in the roller coaster that I had to feel because I couldn’t stop her approaching death through my considerable analysis.
A year and a half have passed since Momma left her house for the last time. We sold the house within about six months of her death. I can pass a favorite bakery of hers or one of the restaurants that the diva and I would frequent and still feel a jab in my viscera that can cause me to pull the car over and weep like a baby. I don’t know if this will ever end.
I do know one thing: I am finding my way back to my center. I am re-calibrating my compass and setting my sights on my personal North Star once again. Here is what I’ve learned about the process of re-grounding and re-focusing myself after a particularly wrenching turn of the roller-coaster:
Forgive Yourself. As much as we love the Marvel Comic fantasy figures, we aren’t super human. We require gentle internal conversations with self, kindness and allowing ourselves to exist where our emotions take us in any given moment, and the knowledge that falling apart is the precursor to stronger reinvention.
Softness Wins Over Hardness Every Time. My Mother studied the Tao Te Ching and taught me that water flows everywhere and around the hardest substances on earth. The ability to be less rigid, both with ourselves and in our interpretation of the world, can save a lot of grief.
Accept Your Authenticity. We are beings composed of the full spectrum of attributes—from the noble to the shameful characteristics that we choose to hide. But we are all of those things. Gently cradling the truth of our essence allows us to know from where we start on any given day. We can better chart our new course if we know the truth about where it begins.
Ask Yourself One Key Question: What is the Legacy That I Wish to Live? Start living it now. Live backwards. Ask this question after every precipitous turn of the roller coaster because the answer will change, even if nuanced.
These concepts apply to individual journeys as well as to collective experiences in an organization. Change requires adaptation for optimal survival. At the end of the day, we must take the time to know our individual and collective selves in order to find that North Star, over and over. It is a never ending quest.
