I’m dancing again
I accidentally took the summer off from writing this newsletter. So hello autumn (sorta) and hello readers, it’s been awhile!
I didn’t know I needed a holiday from writing my newsletter – which I typically write and send once a month. Nobody is telling me to write this and the once a month thing has been my own intention, a cadence I chose.
And yet, not sending it has been a lesson in accepting the flow of inspiration (slow) instead of fighting against the current I'm in. I’ve needed to honor one of the ethos of this coaching practice: take the time you need.
In my time away from writing...
I've been looking at old photos. I found myself pausing when I came across this photo of me and my Grandma B on a beach in Florida, where she lived half the year to escape the harsh winters in Chicago.
The photo was taken in February 1988. I am four and Grandma B is seventy.
I love that we are being restful together (sharing in common a tendency towards sleepiness and naps). I smile seeing that we are wrapped in blankets on the beach – classic behavior for two humans who ran/run cold. And look at how we are also linked through our purple tops! This photo was taken 14 years before Grandma B died and this month marks 23 years without her physical presence. It means so much to me to find this photo whose full story is lost to time yet clearly shows our many connections.
Studying the photo I am stirred as I realize that I am not halfway between these two humans, even though it feels like I could be. I do the math: at this moment in time I am actually closer in age to 70-year-old Grandma then to my 4-year-old self! I can barely believe that! The recognition makes me reach for both of them.
Though the phrase “the days are long but the years are short” circulates more in the parenting community (which I am not a part of), it feels apt for being middle age as well. Recognizing my greater distance from my childhood than to my golden years makes me ache.
Am I being intentional about this era? Am I paying enough attention? Maybe it’s why I’ve been moving at such a meandering pace these last months, trying to force time and the grind to follow suit. I want to savor more. I want to keep remaking and reimagining. I don’t want to get to seventy and feel like I only scratched the surface of my longings. And I don't want to lose my childlike wonder, my connection to little me, at any age.
My parents moved out of my childhood home and their home of 51-years last month, adding to the full on WTF-OMG-panic of this season of life. Here's another sleepy/sleeping photo from before my parents updated the wallpaper. If you squint you’ll see my Dad, my brother, and my brother’s beloved Snoopy dog (with my Dad, interestingly), in addition to me snoring on the floor. I can practically hear my mom trying to hold in her laughter as she snapped this photo.
And here’s a photo I took last month while doing a final walk through of “my” home, taken 37 years after the slumber party photo. The photo is of my childhood bedroom and it’s the first time in my life I’ve seen it empty. It’s empty but I think the light is as I’ll always remember it.
I walked slowly through the home I lived in for 18 years plus summers between college plus the three months at the beginning of the pandemic. A home I also had the ability to return to for an additional 2+ decades (a luxury)! It already didn’t seem like “my” home because all the rooms were empty or staged with generic furniture and none of our family photos were grinning at me.
I started to cry as I walked down the stairs and looked out the window at the landing. So many eras of going up and down these stairs and this was my last time. How could that be?
How could my parents have reached the stage of life in which they move on because of all these stairs? How could I have reached this part of my life? It feels so soon. We were just sleeping on the floor together with our stuffed animals! It was only yesterday...
We have many lasts in life. But how many that we know in the moment will not be followed by more? In that way, I think I was lucky to know this was my goodbye: my final time descending those stairs, my final time noticing the light, my final time checking the season by the leaves on the tree outside the window.
So many versions of me existed in this home. I got to close the book as a self that has come to accept the consistency of change.
Alongside this cauldron of emotion and processing and facing myself, I have been the most busy I have ever been in my coaching practice while also working diligently in my coaching certification program. I am stretching to keep growing as a coach and be more effective with the support I'm able to provide my wonderful clients.
I’ve been showing up for myself and showing up for my coaching clients and trying to show up for the world in a time of great fracturing and fear. What a time to be experiencing change on the micro and macro, in the personal and the collective. What a time to be middle-aged and in the middle of all these feelings.
And what a time to be trying new things, new ways of being.
My newest experiment has been dancing before I coach. (If I show up sweaty and a bit breathless to your session, that's why.)
Dancing before sessions started as an assignment from my coach to explore ways to get into my body before coaching. Which grew from the recognition that I’ve been too in my head about my coaching!
The intention was to get into my body through dancing and see how it impacted my coaching. My hypothesis prior to doing this was that it would increase my access to my intuition and allow me to be more present with clients. That hypothesis is still in process – collecting data.
However, the very first time I danced before coaching, I made an entirely unplanned for discovery: I haven’t been dancing.
Not only literally (which is true), but also in a larger way of moving through my life: I haven't been dancing. I haven't been moving or living in an unconscious, playful, and free way. I haven’t been approaching life with a sense of wonder and curiosity.
I haven't just been in my head about my coaching, I've been in my head, period.
I’ve been moving through life small, scared, and tight. I haven't been playing my full range, so to speak. Certainly there are plenty of obvious reasons this could be the case and yet I want to be lovingly curious about why this is happening and what the impact has been. My curiosity reminds me that my values of possibility, adventure, and play require embodied expression. What if it's okay to unfurl now?
It took one dance for me to feel my disconnection and my longing.
Feeling myself in my high-tops, mid-90s. Album cover for my dance era?
This all got me thinking about how “the work” (as we call it in spaces, like coaching, that promote growth and change) so often surprises us. We go into it thinking we know what the work is about, only to discover a deeper purpose.
If you’ve hired me for coaching, this probably sounds familiar. You came in thinking coaching was going to be about getting a new job or improving communication with your partner or reconnecting with passion projects. A few sessions in you/we discover “the work” is actually about confidence or growing self-trust or setting better boundaries. Clients bring focus areas to coaching and then the “capital A”/big Agendas reveal themself. Nearly every time.
It only took one pre-coaching dance to illuminate the embodiment practices I needed on a big picture level and my desire to re-engage with joy and play. The bigger purpose always makes itself known.
My awareness has helped me be with big life changes with more grace and patience. I am moved and motivated to be making this connection in my own life about how I am moving through, just as I hope my clients are inspired when we come upon the “big Agendas" of their coaching work.
Right now my life is asking me to dance, to feel, to remember, to say my goodbyes, to find the courage to participate in world-building, to move and be moved, and to face – and trust – my middle-aged self.
What is the real work you are called into right now?
Whatever you are seeking is also seeking you. Let it find you. Let it shape you.
