No Strings Attached

The other morning I woke up decidedly on the wrong side of the bed, and it went downhill from there. My feelings became the filter through which I saw, heard, and interpreted everything and everyone, and it wasn’t pretty. I felt like a marionette. You know. One of those puppets with strings attached to different parts of the body, including, at least in my case, my mouth. Like The Lonely Goatherd in The Sound of Music, I was at the mercy of the circumstances and emotions pulling on my strings.

Control, it seemed, was out of my hands. Or was it?

What if instead of a marionette I could be more like a hand puppet? Like Daniel Tiger, X the Owl, or Lady Elaine Fairchilde in Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, it could be my hand in charge. A hand puppet isn’t pulled about by external forces. Guidance comes from within.

As a 4 on the Enneagram, emotions are my thing. There isn’t an emotion I haven’t experienced, and the ones that a lot of people work hard to avoid come easily to me. Because big emotions don’t scare me, I can be the calm in the midst of your storm. A quiet, safe place to show up with your grief and sadness, anger and fear, I won’t try to talk you out of how you feel.

As it turns out, being a feeling kind of girl is my gift.

It’s also my curse

Because I tend to lead with my heart, I can easily turn over the controls to my feelings and react accordingly. With, as you might imagine, very mixed results. I’ve been practicing not letting my feelings run the show. Catching myself before losing myself to the emotions of the moment, and that practice is paying off. But this puppet metaphor feels next level. There are no strings attached to those emotions, other than the ones I attach myself.

Rethinking Obedience

I’ve never loved the word obey, or any of its derivatives. They all imply submission to an authority figure, the exertion of control over my choices, and a loss of personal agency.

Not my jam.

Recently however, the phrase a long obedience in the same direction showed up in a text of encouragement from someone I love. There was something about that gathering of words that had the rich ring of a deep truth.

In a culture that lives on clicks and instant feedback, going the long haul for something that matters can be a tall order. My family and I are in the midst of one such long haul, and maybe you are too. That’s where the whole obedience thing kicks in.

It isn’t submitting to someone else’s authority. It is staying true to our own.

It’s not turning over the controls to someone else. It is continuing to stay our course.

And It’s not a loss of personal agency. It is the exercising of our will to achieve something worthwhile.

A long obedience in the same direction gives us the power to hold true to a vision worth waiting for and working for.

“The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.”

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Where The Buck Stops

“Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”

` John F. Kennedy

Oh, it is so easy to blame someone else for our troubles. To find fault elsewhere. To see cause that is outside of our own agency. To pass the buck.

When a problem with a relationship arises, it is often easier for me to see what the other person did to create it, than look for what part I might have played. If something doesn’t turn out the way I expected, I’m tempted to turn over every other rock to find the cause except the one laying at my feet. If I don’t get what I thought I paid for, I can be quick to demand a refund and slow to consider that perhaps I didn’t do my homework before pulling out my credit card.

Whether it is an issue in a relationship, a breakdown in communication, a lack of clarity around expectations, or a disappointing result, if I am willing to look closely, I can almost always find what role, no matter how small, I might have played in the way things turned out. When I take ownership for what is mine, there is almost always something I can do to address the situation. When I allow the buck to stop at my desk before moving on, it allows me to look for ways that I can take action to help resolve the conflict, bring closure, clear the air, extend forgiveness, offer an apology, bring clarity, open a door, resolve the problem, or change the outcome.

I’m not saying that others aren’t culpable for their part of the bargain.

They are.

So am I.

Viborg Cathedral - Viborg, Denmark