JW: ReLearning How to Collaborate

Eric ... I am delighted by the thought of collaborating with you on the journal ... not only for the fun of collaborating but because you bring so much to the table and because I think that together we might make something of value.

However, I'm out of practice at collaborating so I hope you will be patient as we figure out just what this means and how it fits both of our inclinations and needs. I woke up under the spell of some new thinking this morning and immediately started down my normal path of deciding to do something ... posting something on Substack on Wednesday, incorporating ideas picked up at a Storytelling and Listening workshop from Saturday, etc. 

Fortunately, I heard the screeching of brakes before actually doing anything. I need to tell you about the workshop and I will in a separate post. It strikes me that instead of the "journal" being just ideas and blank pages, that it could be a guided storytelling experience ... thus, reducing the inclination to use a journal as a whining/ranting space. (More conversation obviously needed.)

Because of that idea and my normal rush to action, I started journaling about a chosen dimension: Responsibility/Spontaneity. (before we've even settled into an agreed upon listing of dimensions). This was speeding into a post for Wednesday when the brakes started squealing.

So, I rewrote the post into a possible post asking for reader input, with the idea of turning this into a conversation over the next several weeks/months to help us craft the journal into something useful for us and readers. (this was also based on current input from a Substack author who talked about his experience using Substack in this way ... plus an idea I've been contemplating for years for ways to create an "iceberg book" where the actual book (journal) is the tip of the iceberg and connected to a larger body of information/experience.)

Anyway ... this is getting long ... I would like to queue up talking about the process of collaboration for Friday. What you do and do not want to do? How to make space in our working together and in the journal for our differences as well as our commonalities? How to communicate when we are, or feel, out of sync? (Remind me to tell you how Lynne and I did this years ago.)

I know your housing search is a critical priority so we need to know what's important for honoring that and the differences in attention that most likely will create.

(BTW ... I decided to write my own list of priorities and it took me down a rabbit hole of finding categories, so I'd like to spend some time talking about that also. I can see us opening the journal with a priorities exercise with perhaps a weekly revisitation. Turned out, for me, the word priorities was much more effective than values or goals.)

Below is the reworked post ... which might be posted at a future date or edited as needed or ??? ...

joyce

Suggested Substack Post: Paradox Journal ... Using stories to shape self-awareness

Paradox: the often confusing tug of virtuous, although contradictory, values. The trick for dealing with paradox is not to "pick one" as the better of the two but to dance between them allowing each to brighten and empower the other, banishing guilt as the all-too-frequent by-product of not reaching the perfection of either end of the spectrum.

This Wednesday series of posts is intended to be the seed bed for a self-awareness journal currently in development. The journal concept is a reaction to two life-times of reading mountains of wisdom books on what boils down to living a better, happier life. There are two of us on this journey ... a PhD psychologist who has specialized in the use of assessments to help people on their journey and a writer who began adulthood in the alternative school of "Think and Grow Rich," ala Napoleon Hill.

Joseph Campbell's video "Finding Joe" launched both of us on a strange and ill-defined Hero's Journey, even more reading, and an endless conversation trying to figure out what, indeed, was that Holy Grail we seemed to be chasing.

One thing became clear ... reading was not enough so we began to tell our stories in a loose form of life review and sporadic readings of our journals. Soon, we felt the need for more structure to guide our individual work and which would also allow space for new insights to arise from our conversations. This led to the idea of developing a journal, or series of journals, to provide structure that would lead to integrating the gathered insights and wisdom into our day-to-day living.

The foundation of this journal will be stories ... your own own stories plus our stories and others to serve as inspiration and guides. Too often journals become dumping grounds of whining and ranting rather than instruments of transformation. Lacking gentle and inspiring direction, blank pages can be intimidating spaces. This journal will ask you to reflect on your own life experiences in order to make sense of the paradoxes that surround you.

An example of one of the dimensions of paradox is Responsibility and Spontaneity and here's an example from Joyce's journal. (Eric ... the idea for these posts would be that we would alternate dimensions and journal readings.)

Life taught me to be responsible;

I always wanted to be spontaneous,

responding to the whims of the moment.

There are rules: The Ten Commandments, the legal system, "house rules," the how-to-get-good-grades rules. Within those boundaries exists a zone of safety and acceptance. Beyond, there be dragons.

The dragons began to whisper to me the summer after my junior year in high school when the plant where my father worked shut down. He had played by the rules for ten years but suddenly his job was gone and there were few options in our small, southeastern corner of Kansas.

A new job possibility for my father appeared in Arkansas. It wasn't quite ready though and, as the new school year approached, the question of where I should start school loomed. Finally, it seemed to make sense for me to be in Arkansas in order to start school even before my parents moved. The result was that, at 16, I lived in a rented room in a boarding house and began my senior year in a new school while my parents remained in Kansas.

Suddenly, I was "off the farm," living in a city, making my own decisions, meeting new friends, exploring a new life. I was free. And, while I might have gone a bit teenage-wild, my responsibility roots held firm ... no smoking, drinking, drugs, wild parties, etc. I even studied more than I had at home since the new school was more demanding than the former one.

But, the dragons were whispering. I made friends with a Catholic girl who rented a room in the same boarding house. (In my tiny world, talking about different religions was a radical activity.) My new best school friend was married and shared some parts of her life as a military wife. It was 1962 and I saw "whites-only" water fountains and went to a school where there were no black kids. My first boyfriend came along and we discovered the joys, and fears, of making out. I became a part-time waitress at a neighborhood BBQ stand and learned how to flirt with the customers.

My time was mine; my world grew larger as I was pulled toward spontaneity, while still bound tightly by responsibility. The experiment only lasted one semester until my father wound up taking a job in Tulsa. I reluctantly rejoined "normal," but, I had tasted freedom and that pull of new places, new people, new experiences ... the spontaneous life ... was already in my blood and still bumps up against responsibility even as I sit here writing while being called by a sunny day to go play.