Ramblings that Make Sense
Sunday ponderings of letting things be, lettings things go, letting things come
I woke up this morning hearing Disney tunes on the piano. A cousin of mine from the US arrived yesterday with his family. We haven’t seen each other in a long time. His kids are grown. Mostly taller than me. And one of them knows and remembers the entire clan’s birthdays and recited all of them in almost perfect chronology. I am reminded how I have always been fascinated with young people. When I am around them, there is always this air of possibility. At least for this conversation with my cousin’s eldest son Drew, I found his curiosity for the family’s history endearing. I was told that he had been promised this trip since last year.
I enjoyed seeing my sister’s kids and my cousin Andrew’s kids hang out and bond over Filipino food and family history. Reminiscing memories of our time growing up in our grandparents’ old house in Cebu is always a topic of conversation that immediately puts me at ease. The scent of sinugba, the roosters crowing outside my lolo and lola’s house, the lively chatter in the living room, the sight of old yellow tinted photos on frames on the walls, the mix of warm and windy weather. These are the sensations that are awakened when I find myself remembering how I grew up with my cousins. Seeing the new generation of my family initiate these connections amongst themselves makes me feel I have some kind of responsibility in keeping some of these memories alive.
Lately, I have been doing a lot of remembering. Most especially memories that have felt a little detached from my “day to day” experiences. Last week, I remembered being a voice student after being witness to the passing of my friend’s grandmother. I remembered my teacher’s house, the afternoon lessons and the unsweetened ice tea. I remembered how I learned how to be more interested in improvising with music and dabble with songwriting. And I realized that this kind of remembering is important especially during moments when you want to sustain a reflective practice that transforms and enriches your perspectives so that you begin to show up in daily life with greater self-understanding.
When I rush into my day with very little time to gather my self or listen to myself, I find myself reacting to everything. With unbridled frustration, much to my dismay. But when I give myself the time to ponder closely the way I relate to things happening in my life with less speed and with more care for the way I feel, then I end up caring more about how others experience me.
Lately, I’ve been learning how to appreciate interactions that are less fast paced. Less about finishing something off, like a task to do or a target to chase. I’ve made up my mind to try and be more intentional about incorporating some of Otto Scharmer’s TheoryU principles in the way I navigate my own life. Open mind, open heart, open will. It’s been embedded in my operating system for a while now but I noticed that I haven’t really taken much stock on how I’ve been living with some of my convictions.
Building a social enterprise for a decade and getting it to a place where it is more or less sustainable takes you into a state of an almost obsessive pursuit to get the outcomes right. Sometimes at the cost of losing some capacity for softness and sensitivity. Open mind, open heart, open will. Saying it out loud brings a cadence that slows down the breathing, softens the footsteps.
I needed to unlearn having to chase a KPI in favor of learning how to manage interacting with a colleague who is coping with adult ADHD. Open mind, open heart, open will. I say this to myself especially when all my faculties wrestle this openness shut. This dance between traditional forms of management or leadership and finding that style where I learn how to be more adaptive to a person’s state of wellbeing (and still lead them so they learn how to eventually perform) is something that I honestly did not learn in business school. To my surprise, I found that I’ve had the capacity to navigate the ambiguity of managing a person’s performance because I have experienced the complexity of learning and mastering a classical piece of music, or I have witnessed a young person’s narrative unravel from finally facing their issues and accompanying them in a journey of self discovery as they build their own convictions about their faith lives.
I am not sure if I am making sense but I suppose what I am saying is that I am in a phase where I have begun to realize that my experiences in life are so broad in their variety, that it has made me slow in describing how these experiences have chiseled the leader out of me. That it why, I have committed to showing up here and be with my practice of writing and sifting. Hopefully to come closer in being able to define and describe the convictions that have urged me in following this kind of path to live my life.
I guess there is that point where you really have to face the kind of life you’ve made for yourself. I notice that I feel like I have had to explain myself to a few people who have known me in different stages of my own timeline. It does feel like I’ve endlessly been shapeshifting. Such is the journey of self discovery and mastery. It’s an iterative process, an ongoing rhythm. Open mind, open heart, open will.
Maybe I need to reintroduce myself, as I have seen others do in their own platforms. And maybe this reintroduction will not be complete because I am still becoming. Nonetheless, let me try do to that again.
I got into the expressive arts and mental health work 11 years ago after I experienced major burn out from a corporate job as an HR professional. I am blessed to have crossed paths with the people I work with now because I would definitely call the experience a divine appointment. Each person in my team has their own wellbeing and mental health story. Each person in my team has their own narrative with the arts. We have all found ourselves in this path of wanting to do significant and meaningful work that creates bridges around societal gaps we find ourselves witnessing—especially in the areas of education, work life balance, human rights, climate change, social work and organizational sustainability. We have built this team and experienced the struggle of having to start building things from scratch and learning the ropes of how to communicate and sell services related to an art and mental health advocacy alongside fumbling with our operational processes and ever evolving business model.
Before all this, I thought I was going to be an HR professional for a multinational company because that’s what being in business school taught me. I never thought I’d care about society’s issues let alone end up being a youth ministry for a church youth group along the way. Before that, I thought I would dabble with being a writer and write some fiction or poetry or sing songs for an indie band. I never thought that my writing would be geared towards writing prayers for prayer night gatherings that would create space for people to cry together, share lamentations and find ways to muster hope through life’s pressing challenges.
Alongside all this, I belong to a family who stewards an educational institution’s legacy in the province of Cebu (close to a hundred years) where we continue to wrestle with the realities of being a family run organization dealing with multigenerational issues, the evolving regulations of higher education institutions in the Philippines and ever important duty of caring for the relationships that ties everything together despite how much it stretches you on the inside.
I am learning how to embrace the eclectic way my life has unfolded and have found that these strands of my life are what’s weaving my purpose into shape.
These days, I build the groundwork for a team of teachers in a 55 year old preschool. Lately, I have enjoyed conversations with them and their delight as they feel they can be more present in their work because we provide them with space to get in touch with their creative inclinations. These days, I have learned to be a musician who learns to meter the beats in prayer songs we need to learn how to sing and instead of playing my keyboard, I have learned to use my hands as an extension of these beats to get the cadence right. These days, I no longer feel aversion for the word admin and have embraced that its part of every creative process even if the word itself sounds unsexy or boring.
Being open minded, open hearted and yielded to this process of responding to the call of living life as an advocate of these pursuits has brought me to face the threshold of my own capability to endure, persevere and continue to navigate my life with intention and purpose.
I realized, that at the root of it all, what I am pursuing is a life of deeper harmony.
My sister’s son Rycee (the little mister) has arrived. Excited to spend time with his cousin Xavier who is on their way back from a visit with my cousin’s wife’s family. I remember when I anticipated every moment of preparing to meet my cousins in Cebu for summer or Christmas. That giddy feeling of meeting my best friends, playmates, eager to tell stories, eat our favorite snacks prepared in my grandmother’s kitchen.
We are all made up of these stories. We carry them with us, every day. Whether we meet our work goals or not. And I have come to realize that compartmentalizing my life too much that the edges of one part of my life are estranged from one another do not entirely help me become a better person.
This practice is for that part of me that wants to thread these stories together and be happy with how I’ve made sense, even if it’s just me who reads this all.