Open and Connected

I was the opposite of open and connected. I was deceptive and isolated. I was suspicious and withdrawn. I was drinking heavily and hiding it. I was pretending I was happy. I was alone all day, plugged in to Facebook and Netflix and not very much else. I put all of my purpose in living into the separate projects of raising my son and getting drunk, and once my son entered elementary school, the graph of his daily need of me took a sharp, plummeting angle downward. So I drank more and fell into a depression that finally helped tip my marriage over the precipice that it had been teetering on almost since it began.

I talk about the changes to my life in the last couple of years a lot. I'm doing it again today, just so you know.

Last fall, I was accepted to a leadership training program at work. The first half focused almost exclusively inward, with sessions on several ways of looking at ourselves. We took personality tests. We spent a couple of days immersed in True Growth Academy and we took turns facilitating reading groups discussing Brené Brown's The Gifts of Imperfection. We spent some time on Strengths Finder 2.0. We've written purpose statements and classified and quantified and given names to our personality traits, learning styles, and leadership styles. We've talked about who we are, what conclusions we can draw about that, what we can learn about the people around us, and how those differences enhance or challenge us in our roles at work and at home.

I am not driven. I am not ambitious. I am not organized. And that's OK!

I am empathetic. I am intuitive. I am connected. I am adaptable. And those are powerful traits!

Years ago, I would have rolled my eyes and snorted derisively at all of this. I fancied myself a misanthropic intellectual who scoffed at touchy feely emotional hippie mumbo jumbo that had no real world application and was designed to make everybody feel better about themselves without requiring them to actually do anything. Not that I was doing anything either, but at least I wasn't breaking my arm patting myself on the back.

That cynicism wasn't making my life better, though. What the unsustainability of that lifestyle taught me, what the disintegration of the life I was living taught me, what the considerable chunk of time spent in therapy, in introspection, and in working to rebuild my perception of myself taught me, is that I'm not as smart as I thought I was. And I do feel more, much more, than I cared to admit when I was actively numbing those feelings under a steady onslaught of booze and mindless entertainment.

Somewhere around a year ago, I began online dating. One of my first dates, a unique woman deeply immersed in her own journey of growth, became my dating mentor and has since become one of the dearest, closest friends I've ever had in my life. I told her on that first date that what I was seeking was openness and connection. I don't think I realized it until I said it out loud to her that it was what I wanted more than anything. I was tired of pretending to be someone I wasn't, someone I thought I needed to be in order to attract people to me and for them to believe that I was a valuable addition to their lives. She said that what she found attractive about me on that date was that I expressed myself openly and maintained eye contact better than at least some of her other first dates.

Eye contact used to be difficult for me. I aspired to anonymity and invisibility. I worked and hid in a cubicle whose walls I've since torn down. I kept my head down and my mouth shut. Now my name is known. At work events, I hear the phrase, "Oh, you're Rod Haden!"

In my leadership program, we've finished, for the most part, the introspection. We're moving on now to practical application with a group project intended to improve in some concrete way my employer's operations. This leadership training is, I'm sure, designed to be an investment my employer can make in me in order to see a return on that investment. The goal is to make me a better, more productive, more effective employee by teaching me new ways of interacting with clients, staff, coworkers, and everyone else, and by making me feel valued and fulfilled in my work. It's probably doing those things. But for me, it's codifying and verifying and giving a vocabulary to the lessons I started learning well before I was accepted to the program: stay open. Stay connected.

In every instance in my life since I've settled on those as guiding principles, I have never once thought to myself that I should have been more guarded or withdrawn. If I think I shouldn't say that, I do. If I think I should withdraw, I don't. If I think I should pull back, run away, or hide, I push through, stay open, and connect.

And since I'm obsessed with podcasts at this moment in my life, I'll close with "The Peace Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi." I was unfamiliar with it until I heard it quoted by Carey Callahan in her interview on Love + Radio on my morning commute today. I've secularized it because I am not a religious man. I would call myself an atheist, but I more and more feel that there are real transcendent connections in the Universe, connections between humans, connections between all living things, that could be what some people talk about when they talk about God. So maybe I'm not an atheist, but I'm not yet willing to beseech the Lord or contemplate the eternal life granted to the faithful. But this? This is a prayer I can get behind. And in the end, I think it's saying: stay open and connected.

Let me be an instrument of peace:
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy. 

Let me not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive, 
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.