Rounding the bend in the altMBA: on self and balance

I had a strong emotional reaction to our most recent prompt, and in this piece I am writing my way to figuring out why because I feel curious. The prompt asked us about steps and questions that we need to take for ourselves and our lives.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

Please watch this to understand half of my worldview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHnIJeE3LAI 9. I will (crudely) name this half the present. Some other applicable terms might be yin, or music, or receptivity.

For the other half, I will slap on the umbrella term of forward motion. I believe it’s law because I believe in impermanence. My love for production, creativity, business, and growth (among many other things) are predicated on the law of change. Another term could be yang.

In reading this prompt and discussing in learning group, I felt these sides of me knocking against one another. So much of my life has generated a lot of forward momentum lately. I love this momentum, and operations, and improvements, and building things. I love writing and making and shipping. I feel lucky that I’m involved and passionate about so many things I feel strongly about.

and, I also feel the other side of me asking me to slow down a bit. To play some board games and read a book. To go for a walk in the park and cook a long meal, to meditate and make some tea. To get back into yoga and spend time in the practice. To hike and chill with friends, and maybe not ship. Or just ship a big afternoon nap after a night of drinking at local bars.

I wonder if my goals have to be specific and measurable. What if my specific and measurable goal is to be as aimless as possible? What if I just want to slow down?

The truth is that I’m thrilled right now. I’m happy and invigorated and grateful. I just got a new position with plenty of room and opportunity for growth, and spring is here. When the altMBA ends — which I am sad about — I will have a lot more time back. Not to mention it is time that looks different than it ever did before because, part of being in this program was learning how to bend time. Or bend ourselves to fit right inside it.

I will finish out the altMBA strong — that, I’m not worried about as I’m unwilling to compromise on it. This is a spring, and we’re coming around the bend for the home stretch. When I raced a mile in high school, the last 200m was my favorite. All energy is gone — the people who win there are those who want it more. I love where we are.

As I write though, I feel the question that meets at the center of this that I want to explore most — to borrow from the prompt for a bit of ironic cohesion, the question that I need to be asking:

How will I choose to find balance as the altMBA comes to a close, and beyond?

This isn’t a matter of meaning, or existentialism. I’m not suffering. It’s more like the opposite. As I said at the beginning of the post, I’m curious more than anything else.

I think, after the closing ceremonies, I’ll go out for a beer. I’ll invite my roommates. I think I’ll look up a recipe that I’ve never done before and try my hand at it. On Thursday, I’ll wake up and do some yoga. I’ll bring my journal to work to get back into my writing practice, and I’ll start ideating about taking all that I’ve learned — and the energy I’ll regain from more sleep and less divided focus — and begin to chomp away at my new job. Get some wheels spinning and ideas flowing. See what that’s like.

I think I’ll go see the new Avengers movie cause I love super heroes, and I bet I’ll think of Tom and his love for batman. Think I’ll start Finite and Infinite Games (which I ordered this morning) and give Taft a call. Maybe I’ll watch my friend Kathryn play one of her cool RPG computer games and think of Strother’s on-point extended analogy, and hear about his plans for Denver in October. I could buy some canvas and paints to try something new, which will remind me of Abbey for two against the fear. At some point I’ll grab a coffee with Danielle and learn about life, Hastings, and AFYA, hear from Donna about the five senses of humans on social media and how she iterates on “finding [the best] shit”, and think about next steps for Simply Put in NY with Lisa. I could pick Raul’s brain for a couple hours to push my perspective on identity, hear about Alvaro’s cultural revolution as a leader in his company, or discover the myriad of ways Cindy processes the next steps for family and fulfillment. It sounds fun to zoom with Elizabeth to hear about her steps for TALONS and how her son’s baseball games are going, meet up with Lee in Prospect Park to chill with Kelly & co in person, or ship on down to NC to finally meet the one and only Stormy, to hang and work with the one and only Helen.

Maybe I’ll write a long semi-sappy post tagging just a portion of the people that touched me and changed me during this experience. Perhaps I’ll remember how a month ago my lizard brain would’ve pushed back and I would’ve had a lot of inner turmoil about being so publicly personal, and that now I’ll smile knowing that it can be an asset to feel as deeply as I do.

And when I ship, I’ll find balance knowing that as we round the bend towards the end — that we did a kind of work that actually might not exist anywhere else. I’ll know that I don’t have to choose forward motion or the present because they aren’t mutually exclusive; that in fact, I’m lucky enough to have a foot in both worlds, and that to find balance maybe all I have to do is say two words:

thank you.

RS:

It makes me feel more comfortable to reframe wisdom as a set of questions, instead of a set of answers. I don’t perceive myself as a distinctly knowledgable human necessarily, but more of an intensely curious one.

I wonder about this idea of teaching as it was brought up in my RS. My initial (strong) reaction was tied to the above statement to an uncomfortableness around “knowing.” I don’t feel like I know more than other people, what’s further I don’t want to feel that way. I love not-knowing. It is so dear to me and anything that threatens that makes me tense up. In truth, my impossible greatest fear is knowing everything.

So much of what I believe is wrapped up in the ability to learn something from every person I meet. I believe that many times over. and for some reason I haven’t explored that, up until the clause I write after this one here: considering myself a teacher does not mean I have to prove that I know all the answers.

Why am I so nervous to stand in the idea that I could be a Teacher?

I think because I automatically associate the term with Knowing. and I prefer to teach Not-Knowing. Not having answers. The idea of being in a position of knowledge or power, which I associate with teaching — it needs to be re-framed.

Ahhh… I see. My assumption about teaching was that I had to know what was best for others, know what was right for them. It made me uncomfortable because I don’t at all and don’t want to. But I can help accent their perspective or open it differently, maybe. Perhaps a teacher instead of a closer — giving a static answer — is an opener.

Oh.

So maybe being a teacher just means asking the right questions to help others learn — about themselves, about a topic, about their work. Framing it like that makes me feel confident where moments ago I felt resistant. I love people. I would do a lot to help others and I’ve seen that in giving I receive, too. They exist together — they always have.

If I had to paint what the days after this would look like for others — I would just ask us all not to forget what this was and how radical the change has been. Not to forget that little things matter, that humans matter. It’s a lot harder for us to do the work we want — change — when we’re not meeting and trading ideas with 20–100 other brilliant humans in a day you know? We traded so much of our lives within one another, for a month. So I think whatever way we can walk away from the altMBA remembering that this was proof that things really can change — and that we can change things — is a really worthy nugget to take away from this. Just believing.

On goals:

If meditation were a question, it might be: Who am I?

who — initial insinuation that there is one concrete answer. there isn’t. We are many things and people — brothers, co-workers, leaders, strangers, lovers.

am — being. the present.

I — what is my expression at this point in time?

So distilling it, and then putting it together again, a rough extrapolation of the question becomes:

what version of myself manifests right now, as I believe we are always changing?

• What about the environment and climate I’m in is influencing my actions
• What does it mean to have insight about my situations and the ways it is affecting my behavior?
• What control do I have over my ability to choose the behavior that will best produce a desired outcome?

Just asking the questions sets me up so nicely.

I want to explore and LEARN. That’s my goal. I want to prototype international public health, I want to see what the ground is like, I want to build in my new position, I want to read cool books, I want to do trainings for the following topics of interest:

• Yoga
• Wilderness first responder
• Coding bootcamp

among others. I need to think more about prioritize to actually go through the Zig Zigler’s 7 steps. But perhaps my measurable and actionable goal will be to try many new things and gain more new skills. Hmm…

My high-level goal is to not always be thinking about the next step of my life. The lower-level, actionable goal is to spend a smaller percentage of limiting thoughts ideating about the future of my life. Limiting thoughts are defined as:

• unintentional/uninformed concrete conclusions about direction
• ambiguous statements about what I want or what is best
• jumps about decisions that are incongruent with my thoughtful and spontaneous nature

The benefits this goal are numerous. I will:

• spend more time in the present
• I will more efficiently spend my cognitive bandwidth on constructive questions, instead of final answers
• I will remain open to the possibilities and choices that arise in my life after the altMBA.
• I will not sacrifice my love and growth for the various facets of my identity outside of my profession
• I will be able to focus intently on the tasks at hand in profession
• I will be able to explore a variety of opportunities and challenges for cross-pollination of love, life, and work.

The obstacles to overcome are:

• societal and self-imposed pressure and expectation to have my life mapped out
• an immense amount of ambiguity and possibility
• an extremely active brain that requires tethering and guiding
• remembering and defining what constructive vs. limiting thoughts are
• taking the time and meta-mental bandwidth to recognize what conditions precipitate limiting thoughts

Knowledge is:

• I am not my thoughts
• I can be friends with my brain and intellect.

The skills are:

• meditation
• memory
• awareness
• cues to prompt the above processes

The people I have to work with are:

• myself
• the entire human race
• friends and family to keep me accountable

My plan of action, and deadline:

what is interesting about this goal is how day to day it is. I think a better way to measure it — more realistic, most effective — is to measure at the end of each day, in my journal (because a separate goal is to reboot my writing practice). I can note when I am having these thoughts and curb the energy being spend, analyzing the factors that influence my worrying/ideation about the future (because I almost always find connections there; events, comments that trigger my anxieties and brain-churning).