What I Learned | Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

Trail, trees, and sunrise on our walk this morning

From our walk this morning

One of the first things Eric said to me this morning was, “this is the first day of the rest of your life.” Yesterday was my last day of work at CSU. It was weird, but also right. A lot of people assumed I was some mix of excited and scared, but fear has nothing to do with it at this point. Yesterday felt a little bit like my birthday, a little bit like the first time I left home – which I also did at nineteen years.

I first came to CSU 19 years ago as a graduate student in the English M.A. Communication Development program, a program that doesn’t even exist anymore. While a graduate student, I worked as a tutor in the Writing Center, as a Writing Teaching Assistant, and as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. After graduating, I taught various Composition courses, did lots of coding and web design, was a web project manager for a bit, was an editor, a web manager, and eventually the department’s first Communications Coordinator. I created our first blog, had a big part in redesigning the website not once but twice, had interns and a budget. And then it all got to be too much.

There were seven years somewhere in the middle I spent working in a super toxic situation. The person in charge of a big project I worked on is a narcissist. I used to call him that as a joke, and then one day I looked it up in the DSM-5 and realized he fit the description exactly. As hard as that experience was, as awful as that time was, I learned a lot from it. I learned how not to treat people. I learned how to deal with someone constantly abusing me without lashing out or hurting myself. I got lots of therapy, and started practicing yoga and mediation. When my strategies of self-care and coping stopping working in the face of the abuse, I hit my breaking point.

When that happened, I was going to leave CSU. My plan was to quit altogether. Eric talked me down from a ledge, suggested I write up a new job description. I did, explained I could no longer continue to work as I was but that I still had a lot to offer. They agreed and I stayed. It worked out okay, but the workload just kept growing, and even though I said regularly to those in positions of power that it was too much, that it wasn’t sustainable or healthy, nothing really changed. The stress and overwhelm impacted both my mental and physical health. When I turned 50, I thought about how I’d probably work another 10-15 years, and I couldn’t imagine doing what I was for that much longer. I knew I couldn’t keep going.

My now empty office

To be fair, the job had never been my “thing.” It was confusing though, because my thing IS teaching and writing, and the position allowed me to do something that sort of looked like that. And yet, I was doing those things according to someone else’s agenda, fulfilling someone else’s purpose, meeting goals that weren’t my own. It never really felt like the right fit, like an exact match. It always felt like a shoe that was half a size too small, or using a fork when really what you needed was a spoon.

After what feels like a decade of prep, months of having little to no time off because I was teaching my own things in addition to my CSU work or completing various teaching certifications, almost eight years of showing up to write regularly here, hours and hours of what career change coach Laura Simms calls a crossfade — “a transition period where your current and future careers overlap. Your current career fades out, and your new career fades in,” I finally was able to make the choice to leave. To be clear, I can only make that choice because my husband has a full time job he doesn’t plan on leaving, I can get on his health insurance, we own our house and have a really low mortgage, we can pretty easily modify our spending habits, and we don’t have kids. It’s a choice I can make because of my privilege. That said, I’ve also worked since I was 14 years old, and NONE of those jobs were pursuing my own purpose. That, finally, is what I intend to do now.

From our walk this morning

I don’t know if I’ve shared it here yet, but my new job title is: Contemplative Practice Guide. I am going to specialize in yoga asana, meditation, and writing as practice. I am going to teach in person and online. My mission remains the same as always, to ease suffering — in myself and in the world. My intention is to hold space for those cultivating the foundation of a sane mind and open heart, embodied compassion and wisdom. My hope is that from that foundation we can work together to make things better. Along with teaching, I’ll still be writing a lot, maybe even finish one of the books I’ve been working on for so long.

This Sunday is my final day of my last module of my 500 hour yoga teacher certification. That means for the next few days I’m focusing on putting together my capstone class I’ll be teaching. It requires that I create a 40-45 minute sequence that includes something from all of the modules so it’s a pretty big deal. After that, I’m going to circle back and finish my certifications from Curvy Yoga and Yoga for All. Then I’ll spend the summer cleaning and decluttering and repairing and painting our house, planting and maintaining the garden, reading books and taking naps, cooking (I want to learn to make bread, in particular), with one trip to Oregon to visit my family. I’m going to be researching places where I can teach locally, as well as considering the online platform I want to use for some classes I’d like to offer in the fall. I’m going to put together a new website that’s more focused on my “work.”

So that’s a little about where I’ve been, how I got here, and where I’m headed. As always, I can’t thank you enough, kind and gentle reader, for being here. For showing up, for listening, for offering encouragement. I am so grateful for you.

1. A designer is essential. I never would have thought this before working with one, probably would have judged it as an unnecessary extravagance, something that only people with a lot of money do. However, now that I’ve worked with a really good one, felt the ease and comfort of the process and seen the final results, I would absolutely do it again. We didn’t use a designer for our kitchen because it was an unplanned project all around, (what we thought would be a small repair to the floor under the dishwasher caused by a leak turned into “surprise, your whole subfloor is rotten and in order to fix it we have to gut your kitchen”). Because we could barely afford the remodel, which was really more like a really expensive repair, and were doing everything by ourselves, we choose the cheapest, most bland and basic materials. It looks fine, but it looks like an apartment, is no one’s idea of a dream kitchen. Our bathroom, in stark contrast, is the nicest thing I’ve ever had. Our designer’s ability to translate what we liked into a manageable set of choices, any of which would have turned out beautifully, made the whole project so much easier. We had access to her discounts so were able to buy nicer materials than we would have on our own, and she was able to connect us with a really good contractor. If it weren’t for her, we’d still be standing in the tile aisle at Home Depot, crying because we didn’t know what to do.

2. Just as important as skillful, the people you work with should be good. What “good” means is probably different for everyone. For me it means that they were nice to us, friendly, had a good sense of humor, were good to our dogs, respectful of our space and our time. The crew that worked on our house brought a roll of carpet to put down where they’d be walking, always cleaned up after themselves, apologized for being late, asked permission to use the other bathroom or get water from the kitchen sink or wash their hands, let us know what was going on, who’d be working on what and when they’d be there, asked for clarification to be sure they were doing exactly what we wanted, and always asked if it was okay if they needed to stay late. We could text our contractor any time with questions, and even though he was supervising the work rather than doing much of it, he was always around, checking in and making sure things were going okay. He even showed up on the final day to do some of the tiny things, like hanging mirrors and such, because they’d run a day over and his guys were on another job. Again in contrast, the primary people on our kitchen job were great, but the subcontractors were jerks, made me so uncomfortable, and didn’t always do good work, and the only time I saw our contractor was the first day when he gave us the estimate and the last day when we wrote him a check.

3. Having a good sense of your own style and needs is important. For example, we needed a detachable hand held shower head because we give our dogs baths in that bathroom, which also meant we couldn’t have a super deep tub because the sides needed to be short enough that they could jump in and out. Even though it wasn’t super clear, I was able to give our designer a pretty good description of our style, which really helped her narrow down our choices. I told her,

I’d describe our style as cottage/cabin. We love Asian things (more Japanese than Chinese), bamboo, wood blinds, wood floors (although we don’t want to have them in this bathroom), seagrass baskets, plants, thrift store finds, old quilts, piles of books, collections of sea shells and rocks. Clean and rustic? If we could, we’d live in a beach cottage or mountain cabin or old farmhouse year round, so a space that’s relaxing, natural, and not too fussy, comfortable, lived in but loved. And yet, we also love the style of a 60’s ranch house, and Danish Modern. Here’s a link to a few color palette’s we like, are a lot of the colors we’ve already used in our house: http://design-seeds.com/home/entry/succulent-hues36, http://design-seeds.com/home/entry/color-reflect, http://design-seeds.com/home/entry/cut-tones5, http://design-seeds.com/home/entry/succulent-hues37

4. You don’t have to agree to anything you don’t want. You can have a slightly shorter cabinet made even though it’s shorter than the standard if you just happen to be slightly shorter than the standard yourself. You don’t have to have granite countertops, or any other type of stone or tile. You don’t have to have the typical extra towel holder by the second sink next to the door if you are so annoyed by that sort of thing that you ripped the last one out of the wall. And if they find a live phone line in the wall, you don’t have to let them connect it to an outlet in your office if you don’t want one. And you don’t have to pick one of the light fixtures your designer suggested if there’s another one you like even better.

5. Not everything will go as planned. Anyone who has ever done any kind of remodeling will be able to tell you this. You just don’t know what they’ll find when they rip down the drywall, and you can’t predict what other sort of hiccups there might be with materials or schedules or even weather. Whatever it is, it will work out in the end, so roll with it.

6. There will be lots of questions. You will be asked lots of questions and you will be asking lots of questions. Thank goodness for texting and a contractor who is quick to respond.

7. A lot of artists have day jobs. I thought it was super cute how the main guy was always singing to himself on the job, and then I found out he’s a songwriter, is in a band. And our designer teaches design as her main gig, but could easily spend all her time making lived spaces beautiful.

8. Opt for the upgrade, it will be worth it over time. We were able to get really beautiful tile, and a gorgeous cabinet and sinks, and really nice hardware, all of which we might not have selected on our own, but which makes such a difference.

9. I’m not good at giving myself nice things. There’s a really struggle there, not that I don’t think I deserve it but more like I think everyone does too and if other people can’t or don’t have nice things, I feel selfish or greedy giving it to myself. So instead I have things I don’t love or that don’t work for me, and feel a different kind of bad.

10. Giving yourself a beautiful space ripples out. Suddenly you want to make the rest of your space nicer, clean it up and make it equally beautiful. But it’s more than just the physical space. For me, it impacted how I treat myself. I gave myself something nice, and it makes me see all the other ways I’m not taking care of myself, not treating myself so well, and I want to do better.

11. The cost, the effort and the expense, will be worth it. It really is that simple. As with most good things, you’ll wonder why you waited so long.

12. Having people in my house was harder than I thought. Even though they were good people and they were getting lots of good work done, it was really hard. I’m an introvert and an HSP, so all the human contact and the noise was a lot to process. And on many days, they were here around 8-9 am and didn’t leave until 5-6 pm, and there just wasn’t enough time to completely decompress from it before someone was back again. I was actually glad for the few times someone was going to be late or we had a day where someone only worked half a day. It made the whole project take longer, but it was nice to have that space. I think the dogs did better with the chaos than I did.

13. Nothing will ever be perfect. I know people who will nitpick every little thing, demanding things be made absolutely perfect, believing that standard is even possible. I learned during this project to love the tiny imperfections — the place where something isn’t exactly straight, or the spot where there’s a scratch or ding, or the slightly off-centered element. I love the reminder that imperfection, impermanence is our natural state, and am grateful for the awareness that it’s beautiful anyway.