Right now, the hours in each day, and the days within each week are all running together. Even the weeks within each month are running together. Still, as leaders, we keep moving forward, pushing ourselves to keep up with the endless amounts of work and problems.
Then, one morning, we pause in the midst of this endless running, and think to ourself, “What day of the week is it? What month is it?” Then, we realize it is a Monday and it is May.
Again, we pause, and think to ourself, “How did that happen? Just a moment ago, I was getting ready for Valentine’s Day. Now, I have to get ready for Mother’s Day. Where did the time go? Where did I go? What just happened?”
What happened is that we experienced Blursday, an extended time period of going and going. We were living and moving at the speed of software. And, as a result, life just became a steady blur. We no longer remember what happened, where we went, or even what we got done. We just kept moving forward faster and faster until we arrived at this moment on this day, exhausted, overwhelmed, and worn to the core.
In its simplest form, life happened. We do not even know if we blinked, but here we are, feeling broken by the pace and the experience. While everything we did and focused on more likely was important, we haven’t a clue how it all got done. We just know that we can’t keep this up forever.
Furthermore, we know that this is not the life we want for ourselves, and for our family. We know that something has to change. Otherwise, the next pause and realization will be around Thanksgiving or Christmas., At this rate, we will have missed all of summer and fall including the family vacation. The experience of Blursday is real and it has a price.
Author and poet, Mark Nepo notes, “It seems we run our lives like trains, speeding along a track laid down by others, going so fast that what we pass blurs on by. Then we say we’ve been there, done that. The truth is that blurring by something is not the same as experiencing it.” And all of us want to experience life, not blur by it. We do not want to live life and miss it all at the same moment.
Parker Palmer in his book, On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity & Getting Old (Berrett-Koehler, 2018), writes about “the journey toward broken-wholeness.” Given we are routinely experiencing multiple weeks of living in a blur, I think it is time this week to sit down, and ponder this idea of “broken-wholeness.” It is time to recreate our life and our way of living.
When I think of the word wholeness, I am reminded that the words, health, healing, wholeness and that which is holy, all have their original in the old English word hale. All four of these words are interconnected. From my perspective, all four words are integral to the journey toward broken-wholeness.
First, the word health is defined as being whole and sound. Second, healing, which is directly connected to health, is defined as the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again. The definitions of health and healing involve three elements: an intervention, a process, and an outcome. The result of all three is the restoration of wholeness.
From my vantage point, we can engage in a healing process or intervention that will generate wholeness. However, my life experience has taught me that the element which is holy plays an integral part to a true sense of wholeness. We can have alignment of body, mind and the social/emotional elements of life, but without the integration of that which is holy, it is not fully complete. When we engage that which is holy, we gain a greater depth of meaning, and perspective to our entire life journey.
While our outer life may be fragmented, defined and challenging, I believe that wholeness is only truly attained in our inner life. Here, we can always grow, evolve and be transformed. This is the place where our true self can be revealed, become whole, and be maintained. As Parker Palmer notes, “True self is the self with which we arrive on earth, the self that simply wants us to be who we were born to be. True self tells us who we are, where we are planted in the ecosystem of life, what ‘right action’ looks like for us, and how we can grow more fully into our own potentials.” Our true self wants and seeks wholeness, because it understands that wholeness is what makes it true.
And this is where the holy part comes into play. Father Richard Rohr remind us, “There is nothing that is not spiritual for those who have learned how to see. Pray for the grace to see things in their wholeness and not just in their parts, for the grace to reverence things before using them, dismissing them, or even trying to explain them.” Our wholeness is complete when we see the spiritual within the wholeness before us, not just the challenging parts.
Mark Nepo builds on this perspective when he holds up the metaphorical mirror. As he writes, “We are so achievement-oriented that we often surge right by the true value of relating to what’s before us, because we think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.” Experiencing the union of health, healing, wholeness and that which is holy reveals to us, individually and collectively, that our true self is always a growing, evolving, and transforming self. It is not limited by our challenges, or our broken places. Instead, each of these difficulties give us the opportunity to shed the misaligned expectations placed on us by others, or to shed our own unrealistic expectations that we have placed upon ourself. When this shedding takes place and that which is holy is reclaimed in the process, we are given the chance to live more authentically and honestly. In essence, we are given the opportunity to embrace our broken places and, at the exact same time, to honor our wholeness in the midst of our brokenness.
All of this made sense to me this year on a Saturday afternoon in late February. Given we were having such an early spring in Iowa, I had cleaned up the numerous perennial flower beds around our home. Next, I spread fresh hardwood bark mulch on them to cut down on summer weeding, support the retaining of moisture if we encounter another drought like we did last summer, and to create an optimal growing environment for all of the plants.
On this particular day, I was spreading some mulch by a lilac bush when I noticed a sliver of green had appeared on the lilac buds. I was amazed given it was February. This silver of green is called bud break which is quickly followed by the emergence of tiny green leaves.
All of a sudden, I realized that my definition of broken-wholeness was defined by the word broken. I defined this word as in broken down, which would translate into broken down-wholeness. But this is not the definition that the lilac bud showed me that afternoon. The lilac bud had a different definition of broken-wholeness. For the lilac bush on this warm, early spring afternoon, broken was defined as broken open, not broken down.
With my bag of mulch in hand, I realized that I was surround by living examples of broken open wholeness. I was surrounded by the innate wholeness in all things wanting to come forth. Be it in flowers, trees, or people. The divine intelligence in all things is constantly seeking wholeness.
On that late February afternoon, I was being broken open. I too was in the midst of a spring transformation. At this point in the seasons of my life, the lilac bush was teaching me to open up and bloom, to break open and achieve a greater wholeness. I just stood there with my bag of mulch in hand and was grateful. Now, I understood the journey of broken-wholeness in a whole new way.
Blursday happens to the best of us. It is a profound and complex challenge. But with awareness and understanding, we can transform this way of living into a new and better way of living. We can thoughtfully purse a journey toward broken-wholeness, and open our lives to a new level of wholeness. I know this because I learned it from a lilac bush on a sunny, Saturday afternoon in late February.
© Geery Howe 2024
Geery Howe, M.A.
Executive Coach in Leadership,
Strategic Planning, and
Organizational Change
