Reset and Renew

Hi, there! I know it’s been a long time. I haven’t really blogged since 2018. Much has happened since then, for all of us, for the world. Out of the gazillion changes since then, one good one for me is that I teach leadership and ethics again. This antigenocide/antiprejudice material, or leadership and ethics, or whatever you want to call it, has been uppermost in my mind lately. I have studied a lot as well. I feel I may have something to say.

My last blog was optimistic about how we could intentionally increase our sense of connection and potentially reduce prejudice from home through imagination (imagined contact) and lovingkindness meditation.

Yeah, I didn’t do them either. It’s funny how hard it is to keep up such practices. Though I don’t remember exactly, I don’t think I made it more than a week or two. In the past, I haven’t been very disciplined with things I “should” do. I’m more motivated by what’s interesting. Some things, like writing in my notebook, I do every day. (For decades now actually.) But many other healthful things are more of a challenge.

This month, I’m inspired by Insight Timer’s Mid-Year Reset 30-Day Challenge and Martha Beck’s Beyond Anxiety to do some form of meditation for at least 5 minutes a day. Not necessarily lovingkindness meditation or any sort of meditation. I leave it wide open to appeal to the part of me that likes to have variety and fun (so I can actually commit and follow through). I won’t blog daily, but I’ll check in and let you know how it goes.

Why does this matter to antigenocide/antiprejudice or leadership and ethics? Because we live in a frightening and urgent time in the world. We can watch genocide and executive overreach every day on social media. It’s a dangerous time for many of us. And there are also people it is awfully difficult to understand. It’s scary. And painful.

I can only speak for myself. The more I watch, listen, and doomscroll, the more my anxiety mounts. Right after October 7, I listened to a lot of books that made me much more informed and made me feel furious, terrified, and exasperated. However justifiably scary the world is, my body cannot stay in fight-or-flight all the time. I’ve collected my share of chronic diseases from that kind of poisoning already. (I don’t recommend it.)

I’ve also read that when we’re in fight-or-flight (or fawn: one of the basic fight-or-flight strategies is fawning: I feel like that explains so much about the toadying going on), the parts of our brain most associated with creativity and problem solving shut down. I can certainly say that when I’m scared and irritable I make poorer decisions and show up in ways to others that I later regret.

So if I want to have access to my full creativity and be intentional and make good decisions about what I do and how I show up (in other words, lead or engage in action or intervention), I need to, in Komives, Wagner, et al.’s (2017) words in Leadership for a Better World, “engage in personal renewal” to sustain commitment (99). That doesn’t just mean meditation. In addition to down time, I need fun time to be my best self. For all sorts of good reasons, I haven’t been doing enough of that. And I am going to change that.

If any of this resonates with you, perhaps you need to give yourself some time too. This is not ostriching; it’s an intentional strategy to come back renewed.