The father-daughter dance at weddings almost always brings me to tears. I never had a dance with my dad. He never got to see me get married, have children, and build a life as an adult.

When I think about the why of raising children, I often think in a long term way – I think about when they are grown, become contributing citizens to the world, and live with gratitude and a knowing of self. The things I look forward to, though don’t have any guarantee of, are celebrating the big milestones like if/when they graduate high school and college, find a partner/get married and getting their first full-time job.

While the days are long, the years are very short. The big milestones aren’t going to come for a while so I try my best to find fulfillment in the every day because those big milestones are only possible in the daily effort that I put in now, and that effort can only continue if I celebrate the wins now as well.

My favorite kind of storm is filled with tension in the air, flashes of inspiration, and thunderous applause – it’s a brainstorm!

Brainstorms take place at a beginning completely full of possibilities. You can’t brainstorm wrong – there are no “incorrect” or “bad” ideas. Everything is a contribution towards progress, and anything is possible. All of these points make me absolutely giddy but for some people, the idea of a wide world of possibility can be scary.

I have offered to brainstorm with dozens of people but few have accepted the offer. Starting something can be overwhelming and bringing another set of eyeballs can feel intrusive or vulnerable or unnecessary.

However, having a brainstorming partner, or even better – multiple partners, can completely change the trajectory of an idea. We only need to be brave enough to allow others into our space to weather the storm together.

Growing up, there was a little joke or maybe it was a way to help remember how to spell assume but it went like this – when you assume, you make an “ass” out of “u” and “me.”

I’m not sure I fully grasped that pseudo-definition until now.

We make so many assumptions each day – and many of them are about other people. In this age of fast information, learning about others via social media and lack of real communication, we fall back on assumptions to fill in the blanks about a new friend or a relative we haven’t seen in a while or a co-worker.

We take one attribute we know and start connecting a bunch of dots about them – “Oh, they have an electric car so they must care about the environment. >> And if they care about the environment, they must believe in global warming. >> And if they believe in global warming, they must be looking to reduce their carbon footprint. >> And if they are looking to reduce their carbon footprint, they must also recycle.” And then when we freak out because they don’t actually recycle, what does that say about us?

The trouble with assumptions is that at some point, we believe they are actually true. And when someone doesn’t meet the expectations that our assumptions have created, we react and can easily get mad at them because we think they’ve somehow done something wrong! Thus, making an “ass” out of “u” and “me.”

I’m not saying that we should stop assuming altogether because I’m not sure it is possible to stop. It is a very natural thing to try to fill in the blanks of someone, but it is really important for us to check our assumptions and not hold the other person to those expectations nor ‘punish’ the other person when we learn that assumption we made is wrong.

Yesterday, I wrote about lens vs. roadblock moments where lens moments happen 2% of the time and roadblocks happen 98%.

When I write, I often share those 2% moments where I come to some sort of amazing self-realization. But in reality, 98% of the time, I don’t and I either get stuck, frustrated or plow through the moment refusing to process. This is important to say because it is easy to compare ourselves to another’s journey and feel “behind” or like we are doing something wrong. It’s a good reminder that what we see of someone else’s life is never the full picture (hello, social media!). And it is also important to say because it is easy for me who is sharing my “victories” to claim a lot of things that are not true – keep me in check, dear reader!

For all the times I write about an epiphany, I spend about 98 other times feeling like my mind, heart and soul are hitting up against a roadblock. There is absolutely not a continuous stream of lessons learned – that’d actually be exhausting! And honestly, it requires quite a few of those roadblock moments to build up before I can get to a lens moment.

Never never never judge your 98% of moments to my 2%!

When I get triggered, I usually freak out and go down a rabbit hole of despair, anger, fear or frustration and stew there for a while before trying to forget what happened and moving on.

And then sometimes (maybe 2% of the time) I’ll only stay in that rabbit hole for only a little bit of time and then gather enough self-awareness, humility and courage to process my emotions and thoughts. I usually try to resolve the origin of it or look for other insight into why I did what I did.

I see these moments as lens or roadblock moments. In one scenario, getting triggered completely blocks any forward progress while in the other, getting triggered becomes an opportunity to dig a bit deeper into understanding myself (i.e., it becomes a my lens into who I am).

We cannot always expect a moment to be a lens moment but it is a beautiful thing when it happens.

My child had a difficult moment tonight that was totally my fault – I let him stay up too late to watch the Olympics.

As I am getting him ready for bed, he starts hitting and kicking me. The angry version of me appears suddenly. Rage takes over the wheel. Words and actions spill out that I can almost watch myself saying and doing but I can’t stop them. It is like a part of me that has been repressed has been triggered and comes roaring out when she’s finally had ENOUGH.

I feel shame over this part of me. “I” know better than to let anger take over. And I think anger can be healthy but this anger doesn’t feel pure. It feels like the little child in me is saying, “You don’t get to do this because I never did! I never got away with all of this nonsense!” She is hurt and does not want to give the validation of my child’s feelings because she never got validation.

Oh my…

“Little me, you had to hold it together for everyone else. You never got to be a child. You were never given the time or space to grow into your feelings. You never got the freedom to let your anger out. You never had that liberty to just be a kid. I love you. I love you. I love you. You have my permission to go do the things you want to do. The things children do. Go play. Go play. Go play. Oh child, go play.”

As I wrote through this post, I actually had to take a break after “Oh my…” to say a version of these words to my inner child. Once I realized that what manifested tonight between me and my son was coming from deep within, a wound that is over 30 years old. Tears fell, I grabbed my chest, speaking to the heart of me where I feel like my inner child hides. When I do these inner child healings, it hurts – years of repression, sadness, anger and disappointment come out in tears and chest heaving but they are worth it because I feel lighter and a little more healed.

A realization I had during my inner dialogue was around my word for 2021, which is “play.” As I repeated, “go play” to my inner child, I realized that the word “play” is not for me, it is for her. This year was and is all about my own inner child work and releasing the habits and triggers that are holding me back from being happy, healthy and fulfilled.

Some days, showing up is enough. No one gets to decide except for you.

My kids hear the word “maybe” a lot, a little too often (maybe?). It is usually in response to when they ask me – “Can we go for a walk after dinner/go to the library tomorrow/watch TV?” Giving a concrete answer yes or no answer is not my forte. Initially, I thought it is because there are so many factors to consider – how am I supposed to give a ‘for sure’ answer?! And the thing with my kids (and I think kids in general) is that their memory is impeccable, so I avoid giving a concrete “yes” because it’ll just come right back to me when they say, “I want to. You said [insert my words verbatim]!”

Thinking deeper on this and because I am in the midst of doing some personal work on boundaries, I realize that this inability to say yes or no is a result of a lack of boundaries. By saying maybe, I am leaving the door open because areas of my life seep into one another (e.g., lack of boundaries) and can impact schedules and whatnot. The inability to say no is also a sign of lack of boundaries.

I don’t have a concrete conclusion to this maybe phenomenon but I’m looking forward to resolving it and I’m sure my kids will too!

The two books I am reading/listening to are Boundary Boss by Terri Cole and Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab.

As our society becomes more and more polarized, there is a lot more of – if you believe X then you also believe Y, and if that is different than what I believe in, then we can’t be friends. Essentially saying, “You are bad and I am good.” Group think and sticking to the herd becomes as much a social element as a survival mechanism.

Being someone who lives in a world of grey down the middle, it makes me uneasy. The big picture is really important but it’s hard to do so when we’ve been socialized to be reductive particularly in judging people with blanket descriptions like good and bad or by a single decision they have made.

A murderer is not a bad person. They made a bad decision but there is more to them than that one incident. They are not bad.

A mom is not a bad person. They are doing the best with the knowledge and resources they have and some decisions may have been bad, but they are not bad.

A child is not bad. They may make decisions that are inherently bad or that we see as bad because of the way we are socialized but they are not bad.

It is really hard to see the big picture. It takes time to get to know someone, and it takes a lot of brain space and power to gather, consider and compute all of the information about someone. It also takes emotional capacity to be able to have empathy towards others. These are all hard to come by in our modern day culture. It is easier to place people in buckets (we’ve been doing it since toddlerhood) and it is easier to make assumptions (so much less brain power) and to keep things in the binary because it is more soothing to be able to make out a pattern when the world is black and white vs. black, white and infinite shades of gray.

But the future of humanity hinges on this ability to see beyond one quality of someone. One decision, one attribute, one incident – no one thing makes a person. Should bad decisions have consequences? Yes but only if we are also addressing the humanity in the person and the trauma or circumstances that have brought that person to make that choice.

And as always, it comes back to ourselves. Building the emotional capacity for self-empathy, self-love and understanding will allow us to be able to see others with the same. And when we do that, we can live in a world of gray.