I torment myself like I torment my interviewees

Last week I had the totally divine experience of handing in every interview that I’ve done for the first (!) issue of the magazine – our Outside-the-Box issue- to Reese (she’s now busily making it gorgeous for its 1/11/11 debut). I got to talk with 11 amazing people who are rejecting the status quo and living life on their own terms.

For the last couple of months I’ve been steeped in these questions and the enlightening answers that our interviewees have given. I figured since I can’t stop them from dancing around in my head, I’ll go ahead and take a crack at them myself.

• 1. What is your work and what impact do you hope it will have?

  (I am groaning and starting to see what I’ve put my interviewees through here) Ok, I am a maker of stuff (Rolfing practice, helper outer to other holistic professionals, founding editor of this magazine) and all my stuff falls under one umbrella: sharing. If I had to distill it I would say everything I do springs from my phobia of letting any truly meaningful experience in my life go to waste:

  I became a Rolfer when it healed me from lifelong (really, I had had a birth injury and was 22 when I finally got better) chronic pain. With that kind of result, I knew I wanted to share this work with the world.

  I started Practice Abundance after I realized how poorly educated we are to spread the word in holistic fields. My first years in practice were agony. People don’t exactly line up ready to pay out of pocket just to see what something so soothingly named is all about. I fell in love with marketing (word-spreading, community connecting), and decided to pass that knowledge along to my fellow struggling practitioners.

  I started The 11 Project when I got tired of having no place to put the volumes and volumes of information I have collected through the years on people who have amazed me, my writing, and my thoughts on what true personal growth looks like. It needed a home already.

  My hope for everything I do is that someone, somewhere (and ideally lots of someones) can have the realization that it’s never too late to be who you might have been.

• 2. Did you ever have a period in your life when you were following the status quo and what did that look like?

  Probably the closest I ever came to that was when I took on the double major of art history when I was in college at RISD. I was majoring in painting and all those cultural thoughts of the starving artist started to work on me. I figured with art history under my belt I would “always have something to fall back on.”

  I’m not a big one for regrets, but when I think back on the number of classroom hours I dedicated to a field I couldn’t stand- and reading books that put me into an insta-coma- I cringe. I could have dedicated the few free windows of time I had to learning something new like textile design or welding. That would have been cooler, more fun, and even more “fall back on” worthy.

• 3. As someone who is living life on your own terms, what are your terms?

  I have to be able to choose what I work on and it all has to come from my heart. I am privileged and I know it. I was born a middle class white woman in the US in 1974 and that’s pure luck that a lot of people on planet Earth don’t have. Since I’m not forced to live in a war torn country, or to dig ditches for a living, I better damn well put to use the privilege I have, and to do that in a way that (I hope) makes the world a better place.

  I have to stay connected to my body. I spent a lot of years in pain and I haven’t worked this hard to be healthy just to ditch that or ignore it. I need to enjoy it, move, and use what I’ve got. My grandmother (who spent a year hospitalized for tuberculosis and later spent her life from her thirties to eighties doing yoga every day) really was right on about this one, “If you have your health you have everything.”

  I have to be able to keep a balance between work that I love and my family (including friends who are family). My work is divine, but family and community is what you’ve got at the end of the day. My son, especially, always wins.

• 4. How did you come to those terms?

  By either living or closely observing what the opposite looks like.

• 5. What’s something that changed everything for you?

  Hitting rock bottom at age 16 and choosing to live. I feel grateful to have made that choice intentionally at such a young age, even if the circumstances that got me there were painful.

• 6. What do you think the pursuit of happiness is all about?

  Ok, in this case one of our divine interviewees truly did take the words right out of my mouth. Jennifer Louden said, “The word ‘pursuit’ makes me want to, quite frankly, hurl.” I think we’re more than a little addicted in this culture to finding some shiny, new, capital B Better version of ourselves. Don’t get me wrong, I live there too- plenty- but when I am conscious of that impulse in me I just feel like a dumb dog chasing its tail. Progress and chasing after something are two different things.

• 7. What’s your idea of hell?

  I’m incapable of fully answering this question, but I can say that you don’t have to go anywhere to experience it.

• 8. Do you long for something right now?

  I work on seeing longing as an addiction that keeps me unhappy with the present tense. That said, I long for plenty of stuff! Silly stuff mostly- a good night’s sleep, knowing where my son will go to school once pre-school is over, being 100% debt free. Sometimes I long for the big stuff too- mainly knowing that the work I do is having an impact.

• 9. What’s your relationship to doubt?

  I found it funny that this question had the most consistent answer among all those interviewed. Nearly everyone expressed a friendly, “aw shucks we’re stuck with one another so we might as well get along” kind of relationship to doubt. I loved that and I think it honestly must be essential to success.

  In my case, I tend to have more of a like/hate relationship with it. I like it when I notice that it’s trying to get my attention, and that that must mean I really care about what it is it’s yapping at me about. I like it when I notice that I’m getting much better at tangoing with its inevitability. I hate it when I feel like it is some brain glitch that humans (me) must have that tries to keep us from doing our most important work in the world. Then I just start shaking my fist at it, “When will you leave me alone! I get it! I suck! You can leave now!”

• 10. In the moments when it’s been tough to go against the grain, is there a person or thought that inspired you to keep at it?

  I started this project because I’m the kind of person who looks to other people’s triumphs to keep me going, so in reality this list could be very, very long.

  However my number one person is my son. When he was born it was like a light switch went off in my brain and I realized that living a good-enough life would never be, well, good enough. Sleepwalking through my days, frittering away my energy, and stepping back from big opportunities to make an impact simply wouldn’t do. I don’t want to live that way, and I certainly don’t want to set that example for him. The world has enough sleepwalkers already.

• 11. What do you think humanity needs most these days?

  I think as a whole we need more illuminating thought sparks that will tell us that, in whatever way we feel trapped in our own lives and situations, there really may be other options besides hunkering down into that trapped feeling.

  Whenever I say that, I think of the privilege issue that I brought up earlier. Yes, it is so much easier to say and to do that if you have a life where you aren’t eking out an existence. And a large percentage of people are.

  However, then I think about the sisters I’ve sponsored through Women for Women, or someone like William Kamkwamba (and you really need to read the book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind if you want your mind blown), and even in their lives which had punishing circumstances, they were able to notice and respond to the spark that set them on better courses. Mostly I think it’s the noticing that we all have the hardest time with.

Well that does it for my answers. We’ve still got a few more weeks of prettifying the Outside-the-Box issue, but come 1/11/11 you’ll be able to read some other very interesting people’s responses to these questions. I don’t want to give away too much, but suffice it to say, good stuff is coming your way!

And you? Pick a question or two (heck, answer them all!) and leave it in the comments section:

Photo by Wetsun