Dear Beloved:
Coming back to the states has been like pressing my foot on the accelerator and bringing all my focus to the road of driving my life towards stability, while diving into the first deepest most committed relationship I’ve ever had. As a consequence, I’ve fallen away from blogging and reaching out to some of my most precious connections.
So here I thought would be a nice moment to offer up how things are going:
In Guatemala, I woke up without an alarm, sat over caffeine and a book, had a poop, and spent 2 hours working on my business or old journals. I would then have lunch, and spend another 2 hours working on something before an evening walk to get fresh vegetables and cook a dinner with my partner watching a laptop for our dinner show.
While we didn’t follow a strict weekend schedule, the weekend tended to be when lunch, the morning 2 hours and afternoon 2 hours got bundled up together into a trip to town or something off the beaten trail. We’d also “whiteboard” together where we would review last week adjust plans for the upcoming week.
In Portland, I have two rhythms, the weekday and the weekend:
On the weekday, I rise and sit and stretch, go to my job in middle-management engineering job at a company that was just purchased by Private Equity Investment firm, sit and work in my cerebral role with lots of small wrist movements for 4 hours. I take an hour lunch to read or sort notes on my phone or have a conversation with somebody. Then I sit for another 4 hours, usually taking a walk at 3 at work and a walk at 6 in the neighborhood when I get home.
On the weekend, I wake up and caffeinate over a book. I think of my life in terms of daily rhythms, weekly, monthly, seasonally, and annually. This looks a lot like overlapping Venn diagrams in my head and the image of the seed of life comes up, so I usually sort my categories into 6 or 7 different overlapping circles. Oftentimes, my partner reads out loud to me whatever book I’m reading and we pour over all the nuances in a deeply gratifying conversation.
Right now, my growth edge in my life is around embodiment. I’ve been unearthing old coping mechanisms around different challenging emotions that are now manifesting as physical symptoms. I am very purposefully choosing new ways of coping and managing that emotional energy in a dance with physical discomfort. Being 31 has come with new aches and pains that have attuned my ear towards understanding my body’s needs at an emotional and even physiological level, that I could ignore and bypass in my younger days. Being with a partner who is 8 years my senior has come with it a resistance to being “the young one” and the gratitude of somebody who is available to provide perspective and presence through my shifting out of “invincible 20’s” and into the next phase of new limitations opening up new ways to be.
In pursuit of that embodiment, I’m very excited about the relationship between language and “systems thinking,” which is a way of understanding the world that focuses on how different parts of a system interact with each other. How one categorizes and names a part in a system (and how they name the system itself) seems to be a meta-system itself!
Everything I’m excited about lands somewhere between the books “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van der Kolk, “The Myth of Normal” by Dr. Gabor Mate, “Thinking in Systems” by Donella Meadows and “No Bad Parts” by Richard Schwartz.
“The Body Keeps the Score” tells a compelling story of how psychoanalysis has evolved from the study of “shell-shocked” soldiers coming back from World War I, all the way to the very nuanced understanding of Complex PTSD, and how our relationship with our parents unconsciously ripples into every relationship in our lives. I first learned of this underlying through “Attachment Theory”, that people can be divided into “Anxious” attachers, who are uneasy in the absence of connection, and “Avoidant” attachers who are uneasy in the presence of connection, and the all-seeking “Secure” attachers who have mastered the balance point between the two.
“The Myth of Normal,” so far as I understand it as I read it now, deepens the research of the Body keeps the Score into the collective. If a society is not healthy, it may label otherwise healthy and unique individuals as defective, when those individuals symptoms are pointing to the lack of health in the overall environment. Compelling narrative for collective change.
“Thinking in Systems” is the epitaph of systems thinking researcher Donella Meadows. My main takeaway is the impact of understanding how different elements in a system (say, how a heater functions to regulate the temperature of a room on a cold day) impact one another through feedback loops, and why focusing on removing a symptom is less effective rather than understanding the context of its root cause. The book goes into various concrete thinking tools that have opened my eyes to many new ways of interpreting the world around me.
“No Bad Parts” brings it all together, how each individual is a multiplicity of parts and how that fractal ripples out into the collective.
If my mom were alive today, I’d be talking to her about these books. In her dying days, she told me about “The Body Keeps the Score” and the works of Dr. Gabor Mate and his lectures on “when the body says no.”
A desperately important part of my life is the evolution of grieving my mother’s sudden death in 2020. Her fourth death anniversary will be at the end of October, and I wonder what words to write about it, even now. I am well aware that I’ve so far posted about her on Mother’s day, her birthday, and her death anniversary. This was the first year I missed my first round of social media posts celebrating her.
And so, to celebrate Mother’s day, her birthday, and coming anniversary of her death, I’m reaching out to check in and ask who in my world is thinking about things like this, or what your typical daily rhythms are, what you’re thinking about at all.
All my love along the way, and hope to hear from you,
Riley
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| Seeing Lake Ontario for the first time on a trip to my partner's hometown |
