HELLO!

Today, while driving between appointments I was listening to CBC Radio. The interview I heard was from a past episode of The Current. Author and conflict facilitator Priya Parker says most of us are not very good at verbal fighting: either we avoid it, or we escalate it until it becomes explosive. In her new book, The Art of Fighting, she advocates for something called "healthy heat”. If you are interested, here it is: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current/clip/16237163-how-master-the-art-fighting

The part of this conversation that caught my attention was the author’s attention to the art of storytelling and how it functions in our personal narratives. Families typically use stories to pass on their identity to future generations. Parker focused on three kinds of stories families typically use to identify themselves. “Ascending” stories are always positive, they tell future generations this family unit began from a certain place in time and space and from there things improved, “life got better and better”. “Descending” stories are negative, families identify a golden age, when everything looked promising, happiness was abounding, and then…A series of tragedies, misfortunes, disappointments, failures and setbacks, forced the family from a place of privilege to a place of despair. And then there were stories the author described as "Oscillating", "We had good times, then we hit a rough patch, but we stuck together and worked through it". Parker believes this trajectory builds the highest level of psychological resilience. This observation resonates with me and affirms my bias toward realism vs. optimism and pessimism. When we set ourselves up for disappointment by assuming life will always reveal joy or look at the world through manure colour glasses, assuming things will always go poorly, we miss the nature of life. Our lives reveal beauty, connection and love but there is also fragility and pain and loss.

One of my favorite books, one I have read and re-read many times, is The Spirituality of the Psalms by Walter Brueggemann. The book is divided into three sections, the Psalms of Orientation (when life feels balanced, whole and truth-filled), the Psalms of Disorientation (when life feels like it is falling apart, the ground beneath us is crumbling) and Psalms of Reorientation (when life is recalibrated to integrate what we have learned from our losses and regained in our new imagination). Reorientation is for me, like realism, like oscillating stories, where we engage life aware of our weaknesses, flaws and limitations, knowing there will be despair, but equally confident new hope comes from the resilience of God’s ongoing presence. I know there is pain, but I also know there is love and love is what makes us who we are. Peace, Kevin