Just Wrong Challenges
Therapy this Thursday
This is a 12 minute post.
Please, take your time!
There are so many possibilities within the state of a Just Right Challenge, and really, any time you look around and see humans doing awesome and even unbelievable things (such as in the Para-Olympics!), you are getting a sense of the breadth and depth and height of what we can achieve, enjoyably.
I really gravitate to shows that focus on the healthy pursuit of a slightly pushed out limit, but it seems there are so many times where that “health” is (as seen in hindsight) traded for the objective, and we end up (a few years down the road) with a documentary, or a #MeToo movement, or a pulling down of a monument, because, as it turns out, the parameters were not “just right” at all.
And that’s sad, because trying to run faster, fly farther, or swim longer are all pretty cool ideas. Not to mention exploring Space, or connecting the whole of humanity in a world wide web, or curing a terrible medical condition. A challenge is what we were built for. We thrive on a certain level of adversity. Every part of our cellular structure is meant to fight gravity (and there’s another challenge - if we escape the atmosphere, then what?). Idea generation is a whole big reason our brains are the size they are, and the complexity. Just try not to be curious. If you succeed, that’s a problem. Apathy is the worst thing for a human.
Anyway, I wanted to keep on talking about stress, and helping, and all the ways I keep trying to pull apart this knotty problem of managing to stay healthy even in a world that is chock full of chaos and hard things. The environment (use any aspect of that word you like) is not a simple structure. Even the slightest tinkering with our planet’s delicate balances and we end up with a host of unintended consequences. Not saying we won’t keep trying, but there’s certainly no way to reduce a “mess” this size. It’s more like we are each trying to make peace with a piece of it.
Relationships are similarly not for the faint of heart. We love and we leave and we linger and we learn, but we do not stay unscathed. We change each other in large and small ways, and lots of the changes are painful. It’s hard to figure out who I am with other people’s contributions sounding loudly in my ears and mind and heart, but it’s just as hard to figure that soul stuff out without other people - without a community to reflect and wonder and push and pull and stretch my own assumptions until they get stronger, or break. There’s no easy family, that’s for sure, not even the families we choose.
So there’s me, inside a world that is not simple, not straightforward, and often the opposite of encouraging. Creating a Just Right Challenge for myself is going to be its own hard thing, and so to do that, I need to start by aggressively (okay, assertively) putting up a boundary around myself. Just so I know where I am and what I can reasonably do.
This is the way I’m now thinking my round pen functions, in the Imaginal Realm. I have a circle around me that pens me in and suggests I can’t go anywhere I’d like, but on the other hand, everything outside that circle is none of my concern, and I can safely ignore it while I focus on the peace in the middle. And that could be Home. That could be a little shelter from even the challenges of relating with whomever is able to access my round pen. That could be my fridge and couch and fire and books. That could be a long bath with candles, or a bowl of ice cream with chocolate chips, or even just an extended period of staring into the middle distance with no particular effort to look like I’m interested in anything much.
Home is valuable for its lack of challenge - its capacity for a long pause in the action. Even relationships can pause here. It is a space and protected time for me to regather my own inner team, to allow integration to naturally occur just by a sort of gravitational settling, to come back to my own core and feel it while lying down with no effort to fight whatsoever. Home used to feel like an enemy of action, but that was when I was so dominated by fear that I couldn’t imagine a shelter from it. Now, I know that action is a choice, not a reactive response. At least, in the lower floors that’s how it is.
So my limits, far from being a constraint to freedom, are now functioning in exactly the opposite way: they allow me to descend all the way to the ground and deeply rest. This is the necessary prequel to action, at least to a chosen, considered, and constructive action. This Home, with its small yard and private rooms and limited options, is exactly what I have always craved, but didn’t know was okay. Words like “selfish,” and “lazy,” and “greedy,” all coated the concept with shame and reproach. I used to think I needed to work all the time, for others, and I therefore needed fear to keep me going.
Just Right Challenges look very different, going up, than they do coming down. Anxiety and even higher storeys of more apparent fear-based responses to the world around me mean I am depleted, body, mind and heart, before I even begin a task. It doesn’t matter how much I want to do that task, or how prepared I am in skill, knowledge, or motivation - if I’m really, really tired, then the Challenge will be too small to get me very far, if I truly stay within a Just Right paradigm. And this is how I think many of us, in the current world of non-stop connectivity to fear-inducing information and images, are functioning. We are struggling to find a Home that does what Home needs to do: protect, shelter, keep out, and enfold us until we are ready, truly ready, to start work again.
In this sense, Home is not necessarily available to a person even if they have the largest, cleanest, most comprehensively staffed and supplied “home” in the community. It doesn’t matter how the building looks and what objects are inside of it; if there is no internal allowance for a cessation of all challenge, so that the person can truly, deeply rest, then the Home is just a front. It’s a set. It is a pretence and an expensive tourist attraction, with no real value other than to incite envy.
I’m saying this because I have realized (sadly, only very recently) that I have not allowed my exterior home to be a Home for me, or, hardly ever, anyway. I’ve assumed (due to those morally loaded words up in a preceding paragraph) that my role was to make a home for everyone else, and that my own needs, coming last, would be met (eventually) in a sort of grateful response by my adoring fans/audience/loved ones. This, of course, was not spelled out specifically in any sort of contract. It was just the assumed benefit of being a self-denying, “good” Christian woman. And this did sort of happen in little bits and pieces of natural friendship/gratitude gestures and love in action by my “people.” Of course they are wonderful that way. But they could never touch (no matter how motivated they were) the deep exhaustion and soul needs for replenishment that were accumulating, year upon year upon year. Of course they couldn’t.
That was, always has been, always will be, my job.
So here I am, finally letting myself descend all the way, past the Challenging and Fun and Workaday floor, to my own newly found and messy-but-evolving Home. In this space I am:
extending experiences of “boredom” as if they are actually “down time”
allowing myself to retreat from constant vigilance as to others’ states, needs, or emotional ups and downs
watching my thoughts scroll by, noticing my body’s sensations, and allowing feelings to well up and recede, all without particular action needed
agreeing with suggestions coming from my inner team to rest, do less, not try, wait for another day, and maybe even do nothing for a while, as if they are sensible and good
trying to loosen the bonds between a desire/wish/dream and the associated plans for immediate action to get that desire/wish/dream, and just pause. For a while. Breathing. Here and Now.
Looking around, noticing colours and textures and smells and tastes and views as options for me to arrange, simply to suit my own preferences.
After some time spent in this very unfamiliar (but quite self-reinforcing) state, I have an entirely different perspective on What I Might Want to Do With My Life. Slowly, I see more options for extending arbitrary timelines, connecting in certain ways with certain numbers of people, and what measures I might want to use to define “success.” This is…pretty great. Early days here, but it seems to me that staying down on the bottom floor of stress, and well within my limits, is giving me a sensation that more closely approximates freedom than any other word I can think of.
Now, I want to emphasize that most of my life has been extremely self-managed. Badly, in retrospect, but not too much was done to me. I mostly have abused myself. I’ve created a climate around my inner team that was composed of external measures of good behaviour, deadlines and stakes that were short and high both, and too many double-bind scenarios to count. Of course I was constantly in a state of Anxiety or worse, and of course I never could stop moving. In retrospect, there were many options and offers of grace, love, descent from an escalated state, and a drastic rearrangement of priorities, but I didn’t see them. All I saw was my own ineptitude. I took every message from within and without as a signal that I just needed to try harder. I’d get there eventually. There was a place I wanted, but could not quite reach.
Turns out, there was actually here.
I say all of this to set up the idea we may have about other people, or our own selves as the complicated “grouping” of points of view we each carry. We often look upon a slow pace, a “refusal to engage,” a “not reaching of one’s potential,” or a passive stance in a group as deficits. They signal possible apathy, after all, and apathy is a precursor to death, because fighting to live is that hard. So we have a point in passing judgement. We do. It’s just, I think we have become way, way unbalanced as a culture, or set of cultures, in regard to how Just Right Challenges come about for any individual.
Motivating others is often a tricky set of messages mixed with threats, shame, guilt, fear, or pressure of a rather unbearable type. Motivating ourselves is an even more intense version of the above. We (and I’m speaking generally because this has been such a remarkably constant premise for action that I think it’s like the water a fish swims in, for all the many subcultures I’ve been a part of) approach productive work as if it is far more important than we are. It is a master, and we are the slaves, and we need a good whipping when we don’t produce enough, or with the right speed, or with appropriate quality. We create challenges for ourselves, in other words, that are Just Wrong.
And so, when we do somehow meet those challenges, the payback is not quite fun, intrinsically rewarding, or a signal to pause and savour and breathe a contented sigh. Instead, the next challenge rears up as soon as the last one recedes, and off we go again, still tired, still hoping for a relief/reward, still feeling vaguely not quite sufficient for living in present company.
If you are reading this and not resonating, rather shaking your head in disgust and a little bit of horror at the way some people go about daily life, then…wow. That is a pretty well-constructed life you have going on there. To not only have a Home, but to spend quality and quantity time there as if it matters? That is wisdom. That is a self-caring act of deep health.
However, I would ask for you to take a quick look around, and just check that your experience of Home is not in fact sponsored and supported by other people without that privilege. Could it be that you are not truly resting in a place you created, which you manage, and for which you are (almost completely) responsible? If there is another person who is sacrificing their experience of a Home Base so that you can rest securely, and with plenty of snacks, then maybe that is not quite the total solution.
I now believe that “helping” others to embrace and enjoy Just Right Challenges starts with ensuring (and maybe even triple-checking) that they have a protected, resourced, and accessible Home, first. That’s the key to sustainability. Approaching this sort of construction of a rest area and expectation of frequent resupply is probably 90% of the battle, in many instances. And boy, is it counter to how I think! I need to really, really work at managing my dogs’, my horses’, and my peoples’ Just Right Challenges from the floor below. There is absolutely no need for anyone to use fear of any type to push or pull someone into an engagement with life. What is usually needed is an offer to help reduce the pressure, lower the stakes, and hold space while another being finally reconnects with their breath.
This goes for me. It goes for you. It goes for a rescued dog, shivering in the back of a kennel. It goes for a high-achieving, perfection-obsessed grade school student. It goes for someone grappling with addiction, or in an abusive (but stable) relationship, or a highly sensitive introvert struggling to enter the workforce. It goes for those with nothing but gifts and talents, as well as those with all the strikes against them. We all need a Home, first, and to figure out a Just Right Challenge, later.
Therapy this Thursday
A Just Right Challenge is one you choose, because of your values, your abilities, your access, and your energy.
A Just Wrong Challenge has been chosen for you, or which you feel compelled to engage in because there are conditions you need to meet in order to have a Home, or be allowed into someone else’s “home.”
Take a minute to think about the jobs you do, the goals you work towards, and the challenges you tend to take on, any particular morning. How did you come to have those particular occupations, and why are you expending all the effort required to meet them? Is it so as to be able to enter Home, finally, as you descend from a higher storey of anxiety or worse?
Or, are you in fact stretching, having a good breakfast, perhaps gathering your inner team for a little bit of affirmation and encouragement, and then starting your “work/play?”
I know that appearances can be very, very deceiving, in this regard. It doesn’t matter what your house looks like, your status in the work world looks like, or even what you look like. You can be (essentially) homeless, and heading to burnout, and waiting for someone to notice, and it can all be quite invisible to everyone else.
Just know that you are worth having a Home, right now. You do not need to earn it, achieve it, or gain admittance via anyone else’s approval, for it.
Everyone deserves to work from Home.
I have come across this article that seems to require other pre-reading or being part of some club or movement I don't know about in order to parse what your terminology is referring to. This article seems to be ONLY written for folks already going through some process with you, or involved in your program.
Not very digestible at all as a stand-alone read.