Can we give ourselves some grace?
It’s Sunday morning, and i’m deep in my favorite COVID ritual — silent disco, outdoor yoga on San Francisco’s Baker beach. The music picks up, and suddenly the teacher invites us into a dance party, in the waves, sun shining on our faces…
It’s been a tough week for a lot of people I love — navigating difficult dynamics like returning to the office or dating in a recovering (?) pandemic, and scary things like sick children, relatives and pets.
I chose a different approach: I took a deep breath, and kept dancing
As I dance into the waves, I decide for a few moments to let go. To enjoy fully being in the moment, to relish in the beauty of this life, this body, this day.
And then bam! I get smacked with a wave — sticky, salty cold water washes up my front, and immediately I think:
“How didn’t you see that wave coming? Why did you let yourself go so far into the water? Now you’ll be wet and miserable all day. How could you mess this up?”
But as I watch the wave recede back into the ocean, I have another thought:
“What if I gave myself some grace?”
I could have caught the larger wave coming. I could have opted out of the ocean dance party. I could have known that her cough meant she was sicker, or how to more quickly spot the avoidant dating behavior, or how to better handle that difficult conversation at work.
I could have avoided that bad thing from happening.
This may be true — in fact, I’ve operated most of my life under the pretense I AM capable of and responsible for preventing bad things from happening.
But in this moment, I chose a different approach: I took a deep breath, and kept dancing.
What would grace look like?
It means every day the rules of the game look different, and that means i’m not expected to know how to play.
I’ve never been great at transitions, and I know I’m not the only one.
As I watch San Francisco start to wrap our collective head around a version of reopening, I watch the stress, strain and responsibility of getting it “just right.”
Restaurants at 25% capacity, people 6 feet apart without masks, people 6 feet apart with masks. Dinner parties. Zoom parties. Return to work parties…?
The desire to get this moment right — where we begin to dream about a life that resembles something familiar — feels weighty and important.
And it should be. Situations like India and Brazil remind us of the cost of mismanagement.
And still, I wonder — in a world where we’re doing this for the first time, what would it look like to give ourselves, and each other, a little grace?
For me, it looks like having more compassion for the people who are continuing to take distancing practices very seriously AND the ones who never took them seriously.
It means joyfully planning solo vacations (with my cat, don’t judge) AND accidentally over scheduling a weekend full with brunches, yoga, hikes and hangouts that leaves me exhausted (but happy).
It means helping team members not yet comfortable with travel find alternative solutions, while also holding ourselves accountable to delivering on our promise to clients.
It means moments where I feel guilty, awkward and anxious.
It means moments where I feel surprised, delighted and joyful.
It means that every day the rules of the game look a little bit different, and that means i’m not expected to know how to play.
It means that when the big wave soaks me from head to toe, I can give myself some grace.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. — Viktor Frankl
In our response lies our growth and our freedom
As I often do when things feel messy and hard, I spent the past week learning from experts — in psychology, mental health and mindfulness.
In one such moment, standing at a beautiful vista but unable to enjoy the view as I kept anxiously checking my phone for no reason, I listened to a podcast with Dr. Christine Runyan, a clinical psychologist at UMass Medical School.
Every time a wave crashes into us expectedly we react the same way we’d react to a real and direct threat.
Dr Runyan shares how “the threat of a new virus instantly activated our stress responses, and sent our nervous system into an overdrive from which it has never recovered.”
This stands in contrast to our natural homeostasis with the parasympathetic nervous system — our “rest and digest” system which, when a threat (or our perception of it) subsides, calms us down and brings us back to our creative, integrated, fully present selves.
We’ve been in this “fight or flight” stress response for over a year, as the immediate threats of COVID were slowly replaced by racial reckoning and the election, as well as constantly changing routines, social norms and futures.
The solution is to get curious about what is happening in THIS moment.
It’s no surprise, then, that every time a wave crashes into us expectedly we react the way we’d react to a real and direct threat — we fight (panic and judge) or fly (fear, blame or shutting down). We may also freeze, a concept covered beautifully in Adam Grant’s recent NYTimes article on Languishing.
The solution, Dr. Runyan suggests, is to get curious about what is happening in THIS moment. To try and fully bring oneself into the present to assess what is happening now, and create space for the appropriate response.
Name what you’re feeling to promote self awareness and turn your “thinking brain” back on. Take deep breaths, especially a long exhale, to directly calm the nervous system. Notice what you smell and hear around you — anchoring in what is here, now, to dissipate memories associated with other threats.
These types of behaviors can help ground us in the reality of what is truly happening, right now, and in so doing transition our bodies out of the trauma of the past year and into a new, more empowered future.
A future where a wave is just a wave, and we can delight in the unexpected.
Or as Viktor Frankl would suggest:
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
