Living in the In-Between: Rethinking Borders and Personal Identity

Re-thinking Borders and Personal Identity: Living in the In-Between

It’s taken me over a year since my retirement from teaching school after 34 years to realize that for this past year, I have been living in what Gloria Anzaldua calls “la frontera” or the borderlands. Such places are characterized by transitions, multiplicities, shifting identities and contradictions. They are places which can be debilitating or, if experienced in a positive way, very generative.

For me, this border runs through much of my life’s geography. Passing through menopause, seeing my children become independent adults, walking my son down the aisle and finishing my 34 year teaching career, all within a relatively short time has left me staggering in the dark and questioning my raison d’etre.

In short – I guess I am having a post mid-life existential crisis.

And it’s been a pretty wild one, complete with disatrous missteps, renewed connections, emotional highs and lows, spiritual crises, and way too much time to think about it all.

Funny, though, with all of the time and thinking I have done, it wasn’t until yesterday that it all came together for me - the epiphany I have been waiting for.

My teacher self, formerly known as Mrs. Pincus has ceased to be. At least as someone who exists in the here and now. She is a memory -- for me and for the thousands of students she had the privilege of teaching in Philadelphia. And she did some good work – some really good work and the impact of that work lives on in the lives that she touched. But she will never do that work again. Mrs. Pincus is dead. Long live Mrs. Pincus.

I am in a borderland right now, in a state of “in-between” – a place, philosopher Maxine Greene has said, where people can achieve their full humanity with one another – a place that “emerges through a web of relationships, woven through authentic disclosures.”

Recognizing this has given me some peace and brought an internal calm to what had been up to this point a very unsettling year. It's helped me understand what I have been seeking this year - why I have craved deep emotional connection while veering away from it at the same time. Now, I can slow down and observe the landscape, much like I would do if I were entering a new country for the first time. I can listen to the sounds of the language, savor the new tastes, hear the new music, see the nuances of color and light, try to get to know the people, read the history and literature, find the landmarks, enjoy the possibilities and the beauty of this fertile place on the border. I can open myself up to the wonder, be enervated by not knowing what’s coming next and let myself be amused, astonished even, by all of the changes going on inside of me. I can try to know others and let myself be truly known.

I do not have to hurry to leave this place, this frontera, this borderland. I can love, linger and learn in the in-between.

Homo Narratus: On Stories and Freedom

In Composing a Life, Mary Catherine Bateson writes about the empowering nature of multiple narratives that people sometimes construct for our lives. The ability to construct different versions of the same major events or turning points in our lives enables us to see the power we have in making meaning for ourselves. And in CHOOSING which of these narratives will ultimately give meaning to our experiences, we discover our own agency, our freedom.

In what Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot calls “The Third Chapter” of our lives, men and women between the ages of 50 and 75 have the opportunity to reassess their lives, look back into the past in order to make a new future. We get to rethink, reassess and retell in new ways the stories of our childhood that we once thought were set in stone. During times of transition, when all of our foundations are crumbling, we get to rebuild the edifice of our lives with the same bricks, but different mortar and structure.

We can look at the people who hurt us or left us and forgive them because we have hurt or left or left others ourselves and we know what compelled us to do so. We can go back and look at our childhood and see our parents with softer, kinder, less judgmental eyes, now that we are older than they were when they raised us and aware of all of the mistakes we made along the way. And we can reassess the stories we have told our children about themselves.

I have always been over-protective of my daughter Allison. When she was 3 days old, she was diagnosed with a heart defect. During a routine check, the pediatrician heard a murmur which indicated a ventricular septal defect. (VSD) This meant that during the first eight weeks of fetal development, when her heart was being formed, something occurred which left an opening in the ventricular septum, or dividing wall between the two lower chambers.

In the months that followed, we watched over her every breath and took her monthly to a pediatric cardiologist who performed an echo cardiogram, ran an EKG and listened intently to her heart beat. We were told to be patient, that there were three possible scenarios that could happen: she might be able to live with the defect and manage it by modifying her behavior, she might need open heart surgery, or the hole could close and resolve itself.

On our eighth visit, when Allison was eight months old, my husband and I sat anxiously watching as the cardiologist listened to her heart for what seemed like a longer time than usual. Finally, he looked up at us with a huge smile on his face.

“I don’t hear anything,” he said, somewhat cautiously.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Well there’s no murmur. It may be that the heart healed itself.”

An echo cardiogram confirmed this. My little baby girl’s heart had developed on its own and autonomously closed the hole between the two chambers. She would suffer no effects from this and from that moment on, had a perfectly healthy heart. I did however, always watched over her very closely. The first months of her life, when we worried about her survival, when we had to keep her from other children for fear she'd catch a cold, when I didn't return to work until she was three because I was too scared to leave her with anyone else set the pattern of over-protection for me
that was very difficult to overcome.

One day when she was five years old, I overheard Allison say to a playmate, “I was born with a hole in my little heart. I had a heart defect.” It always made me wonder how she had internalized her VSD story and how she may have connected it to my need to keep her close to me at all times.

This morning while writing and thinking about narratives and the roles they play in our lives, the phone rang and it was Allison, 26 years old, walking to work in Boston after working out at the gym. An independent woman with a great job and enrolled in an MBA program at night, Ali and I have grown closer now that we live apart.

“I’m writing about you today, Ali,” I told her. “You remember that when you were a little girl you had a heart defect?"

"Sure," she said. "I was born with a hole in my heart."

"Yes, but that’s not the important part of the story. What matters, Ali, is that you healed yourself. You closed the hole, you made your body do what it needed to do.”

“But, Ma, I was only an infant,” she said dismissively
.
“Yes,” I said. “You were an infant. A strong, beautiful infant with a will to live. And you found the power to heal yourself. Always remember that. That’s who you are.”

I don’t know whether Ali ever consciously thinks about the fact that she had a heart defect 26 years ago. I don’t know if she’s ever connected it to my over-protection which she resented during her teen-age years. By re-framing the heart defect narrative, I am recasting my daughter not as the victim of a random occurrence in the womb, as someone I need to shelter and protect, but as a strong,powerful woman who is an agent of her own growth and healing. I hope she will choose this version of her heart defect story and that will use it as she composes the rest of her life.

And maybe even more poignant, is the way this version of the story re-frames me and how I see myself as Ali's mother -- not as someone who needs to protect her but as someone who can help her see her own inner resources.

We can break free from old narrative structures that have imprisoned our minds and stifled our spirits and limited the possibilities for relating to others in our lives – the victim narrative, the invalid narrative, the addiction narrative, the hero on a white horse coming the rescue narrative, the lone ranger narrative, the I don’t need anybody but myself narrative - and recast ourselves in different more life affirming roles in complex and gloriously diverse and dynamic relationships with one another.

Homo narratus. That’s what we human beings are. The ability to reassemble our random experiences into stories is what separates us from animals. We tell stories in order to live. There are some who believe that we can’t help but tell stories – that we are hard-wired that way.

But what we can control is what stories we tell about our lives, and in the very act of choosing from the multiple narratives, we can discover our freedom.

Of Birthdays and L'entr'actes

We celebrated my mother’s 80th birthday yesterday by dancing. And right there in the middle of the floor for the entire 4 hours was my mother Shirley, in her 80 year old glory, shaking her booty, and shimmying up to her 86 year old fourth and fabulous husband, Irving. The party was held at Irving’s country club and if anyone had told me 40 years ago that my mother would be spending her platinum years dancing her life away with a genuine prince charming, I would not have believed it.

My mother, like most of the woman of her generation (or maybe all of us – though I don’t quite have this perspective on my own life just yet) has forged a life for herself that is deeply rooted in the social and cultural upheavals of her age. Born months before the stock market crash, growing up poor, the only child of a single mother during the Depression, marrying a WW II veteran recently returned from Europe, giving birth to three children in quick succession in the fifties, becoming a Donna Reed housewife, only to be abandoned by her husband in the beginning of the sixties, Shirley went through more metamorphoses before she was forty than most people go through in a life time.

A single mother (like her own)during the early 60s, long before it was a life style choice of the terminally hip, Shirley was fueled by pure adrenaline and guided only by her survival instinct. After a sixteen month interval in which she suffered what some might have called a nervous breakdown after my father left, she lifted herself up, found a full time job with the school district and at age 39, entered college and began the education she had forsaken (at the urging of her mother who warned her about becoming too smart to get a man.) She then proceeded to work the system to ensure that all three of her children were able to receive college educations; at one point during the 1970s, all four of us were in college paid for by every possible grant and loan available at the time.

It was also during the 70s that my mother married her second husband. A manic depressive (of course she met him during a manic phase and was completely swept off her feet by his charisma, charm and sexual energy) he took my mother on a wild ride to the heights of pleasure during their whirlwind courtship, sliding soon after their wedding into the depths of despair. I can still see my mother at this time of her life writing her master’s thesis at the kitchen table while he railed at her and wailed at the universe (he refused to take his lithium and shot himself in the head years later). She ignored him until her thesis was completed, then allowed herself the luxury of falling part.

There’s more of course. The 80s when she became an independent career woman, using her newly earned Masters degree to work her way up the ladder at a social work agency, while dating the man who was to become her third husband, love of her life and soul mate.

In the 90s, she lived the American Dream of retirement, traveling the world with her husband, wintering in Marco Island and going out dancing three, four nights a week. She used to say that they were “joined at the hip” so how tragic and ironic that he died from complications of a hip fracture he suffered while they were in Florida in 2005.

After he died, she took to her bed once again, this time keeping company with her late husband’s ghost. It was her gardener who saved her, introducing her to Irving, the nice widower around the corner, the man who was to become her fourth husband, her new dance partner and the host of the wonderful celebration we had for her 80th birthday yesterday.

Last summer, at the Irving's insistence, my mother had knee replacement surgery. For years, she had been having difficulty walking and by last summer the pain had pretty much sidelined her from life. Irving, who at 85 is still vital and who had nursed his wife of nearly 50 years through years of debilitating illness had been looking forward to enjoying his life with his new wife Shirley. He insisted that she have the surgery.

My mother is not a good patient. She has a very low tolerance for pain and knee replacement is one of the more brutal and painful elective surgeries in modern medicine. Throughout the ordeal and it was quite an ordeal, replete with all manner of emotional traumas, Irving remained calm and continued to encourage his wife to do what she needed to do as she spent long months in painful rehabilitation.

It’s funny, looking back over my mother’s life, seeking out the patterns, that it’s the entr'actes that catch my attention right now- the times of transition: the sixteen months after my father left her when she had a nervous breakdown; the ravages caused by her tumultuous second marriage; the months between being a widow and a new bride; her recovery and rehabilitation from brutal surgery.

Maybe it’s because I am in the midst of my own l'entr'acte. At age 56, I am still young and vibrant and thankfully strong and healthy. Finished raising my children, retired from my teaching career, struggling to figure out what comes next, I find myself looking back over my mother’s life searching for signposts or secret messages.

Yesterday, in her tribute to our mother, my sister Janet spoke of alchemy – how my mother has always been able to turn base metal into gold – crisis and struggle into opportunity.

I still need more time to think about what my mother’s alchemical process looks like – to understand her secret formula for making a life..

The only thing that I am sure of right now is that it has something to do with dancing.

Searching for a New Vocabulary

Searching for a New Vocabulary

I joined a writers’ group last night. Run by a local woman trained by Pat Schneider and the Amherst Writers and Artists Methodology, my new writers group consists of twelve people of varying ages and backgrounds, including some who are published writers.

It’s hard for me to think of myself as a published writer, though I have three chapters included in books about education edited by prominent people in the field. All three of my chapters are similar: all are pieces of practitioner research; long analyses of and ruminations on my work of 34 years as an English and Drama teacher in the School District of Philadelphia. They are written in the 1st person, they tell a story about my challenges and struggles in the classroom to make my work real and meaningful to my students and they connect to and build on the work of others in the field, most notably Paulo Freire and Maxine Greene.

But I am no longer a teacher. I retired one year ago last week. And during this year of transition, I have been desperate to write. I have been planning books in my head and cornering anyone who will listen to tell them the details. Yet, throughout this year whenever I would sit down at the computer, with no distractions and all of the time in the world, I couldn’t write a word.

Well, that’s not exactly true. I could write long emails to cherished friends. I could write angsty journals exploring every aspect of my troubled psyche. What I couldn’t do was write anything that I thought would be of interest to an audience outside of my small circle of friends. I couldn’t find the words.

I need a new vocabulary.

I have lived cloistered inside of the classroom for my entire adult life. I know it intimately – its smells (the slightly acrid scent of moldy books and the whiff of a fine dry dusting of chalk) its colors ( beige walls tinted the color of corpses, burnished wood floors with dents and scratches, and splashes of rainbow colored cut out letters tacked on the walls) its sounds (chalk clicking on the slate, fire alarms exploding through silence, the roar of laughter, following the sound of a dish breaking in the cafeteria).

The world looks different from outside of the classroom. As alive as I felt as a teacher, as deeply committed as I was to my work, as thoroughly engaged as I was in the lives of my students, in many ways I was hiding from the wider world in school.

Wendy Wasserstein, in her final play Third writes about the third act that women in their fifties and beyond can have. We have the opportunity to remake ourselves after we have raised our children, attended to our partners, created and maintained our homes. How sad and ironic that she died of cancer before she could have her own. In her new book, The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50, Sarah Lightfoot Lawrence writes of men and women engaged in creative and purposeful learning in what she calls the third chapter of their lives. It is in the process of learning something new that people are able to live through upheaval and transitions in their lives.

One quote that she includes at the opening of the chapter “Loss and Liberation” helps me understand what has been happening to me this year:

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” ( Anatole France)

I have only begun reading Lightfoot Lawrence’s book and already it is comforting me.
After a long and dark year of leaving behind my teacher self, the self I had been developing for almost four decades, I have begun to take the steps towards the birth of a new self.

I am engaging in the process of learning. And in that process I trust that I will find the new vocabulary I need to express myself to others.

I have resumed ballroom dance lessons and yesterday my teacher John lead me through a tango for the very first time. In rumba, we worked on cross-overs, spins and swivels --- new words and phrases for my body’s vocabulary.

Tomorrow, I will begin jazz piano lessons with a young teacher. I hope to learn notes and scales and rhythms that I have never known before – a new vocabulary of sounds for my mind’s ear.

And last night in my writers group, inspired by the group leader’s prompt, I wrote a wry piece about a dyspeptic talking squirrel who confronts a tequila soaked troubled middle aged man on a motor cycle and offers him a few words of wisdom that help him unlock the meaning of his past.

The beginning of a new vocabulary?

Here's hoping.

A Childhood Idyll in Pine Valley, PA

The summer the locusts came we made them our pets. The endless July days would begin the way they ended – with the resonant song of the insects. Jackie, Jennifer and I, then ten would capture the cicadas, carefully remove their wings then gently loop the colorful finger-knitted leashes around their necks. First we’d name them. Then we’d walk them like dogs and race them too. Soon we’d watch them die. They were so easily replaced by the millions of others who, like rainfall, landed daily upon our Pine Valley lawns. This memory of three girls playing together outside of our split level homes is one of my most vivid recollections from this time of wonder in the summer of 1962 – the last season of innocence in my soon to be tumultuous childhood.

My parents purchased their piece of the American Dream on a semi-suburban cul de sac in 1960 for $1995.00, trading up from a brick and mortar post World War II rowhouse to a three bedroom two and a half bath aluminum sided shingle roofed split level. There were two models being marketed in this development of former farm land on the outer fringes of Northeast Philadelphia: the Debutante which sported a front to back design and the Suburban whose living room and dining room were placed side to side. My parents selected a 3 bedroom Debutante with white siding and red shutters, situated on a quarter acre of gently rolling hills. The summer before we moved in, each Sunday, we would take a drive to this emerging neighborhood and watch the progress of our new home being erected. My sister, brother and I would lay claims to rooms or spots in the yard as my mother and father inspected the quality of the carpentry and the installation of their upgraded appliances.

Our house was on Grace Lane, a stretched out horseshoe of a street, which connected at each end to the more linear Darlington Road. The rear of the houses on both streets faced each other, their back yards blending one into the next. With newly minted cement patios, (perfect for roller skating and playing hop scotch), above ground swimming pools, basketball backboards, volley ball nets, sand boxes and swing sets, this expanse of land contained all of the equipment for a summer day camp with none of the supervision or regimen. We children who lived here were free to plan our own days, play with whom we pleased and make use of everyone else’s property.

Jackie lived directly across the back from me and sometimes at night we could talk to each other through our tin cup and string “telephones” that we ran from our bedrooms. Jennifer lived further down on Darlington and was often the first one outside in the morning, appearing on the side of Jackie’s house where we housed the locusts in jelly jars with holes drilled in the lids and leaves and water placed inside to keep our pets alive for as long as we could.

You can go back and visit the site of our summer idyll. But it’s really not there. You can look out the window of my mother’s house, the place where I grew up and see no further than the end of her property line. My mother never built a fence nor planted a single tree between her and her neighbors. Yet, her yard too became defined – surrounded on all sides by her neighbor’s border markers. This one stopped talking to that one, so the spruces went in. This one’s son hit that one’s daughter so wooden spikes were hammered into the ground. This one didn’t want that one coming to swim in their pool because she was wild and splashed the other children, so another and another line of trees was planted until the world of my childhood was completely cleaved.

There is little in the lawn’s current landscape to recall its past sumptuousness. Nothing to suggest the fertile glory of the expanse of the Eden-like greenery that once comprised our collective playground. From the Weiss’ white shuttered house on the corner of Grace to the Polakoff’s house with the red roof on the other end of Darlington, our lawns, like our lives were connected, each to the other and adding up to something greater than all of us alone. The size of three football fields, this communal backyard made up our entire world. And in 1962, the season of the 17 year locusts, the summer before the British invasion, the end of Camelot and the dissolution of my parents’ marriage, it was all the world that we needed.

Knitting Myself Anew

I can tell you about myself through my knitting -- stitching together pieces of myself as I would an afghan or sweater. If you were to examine all of the garments I have created, you would know me. Each scarf, mitten, vest of slipper is a chapter in the complex novel of my life.

We women can know each other by the stories we tell about the objects we have created. We can learn from the knitters who have come before us, the women whose histories we share.

Sadly, I have learned from my grandmother, who wracked by countless electric shock treatments, sat in the chair of her lonely room at Eastern Psychiatric Hospital, knitting one grey square over and over again. It was the one shape she still remembered how to make in the only color yarn they would give her. She never bothered to bind off; she just ripped out her handiwork when she reached the end of the yarn, rolling it once again into a ball. Then like a tireless Sisyphus, she would cast on the stitches anew and begin again the task which had come to represent her life. The shock treatments had burned from her her memory and her imagination. With no history to attach it to and no story for it to tell, her knitting was useless, her life meaningless.

Then there was my mother, who stopped knitting just as suddenly as she stopped believing in my father. One day she woke up to discover that she had been knitting with nothing. She had yoke the yarn of her heart into an invisible cloak which couldn't keep her nor her children safe and warm. My mother created her husband out of the very thin air into which he vanished. The day she learned of his infidelities, she laid down the double pointed needles which held the argyle socks with their interlocking diamonds and counterpoint stitching and carefully turned heals. She never knitted again.


I am not my mother nor my grandmother, though they were my teachers. Their knitting stories instruct me, but they do not define me. For me, it is the process of knitting which nourishes me. Knitting provides the thin string which forms a bridge across a canyon of needs I cannot name. It becomes the thread which darns me together when I have been ripped apart. Knitting has been like meditation: knit one, purl one, a mantra takes me to a trance-like state of total concentration and utter peace. Knitting is the union of opposites I am constantly seeking; the yarn in my hand holds the tension between process and product, between subject and object, between mind and body, between imagination and manifestation.

Knitting helps me de-tangle myself. I can use the raw materials of my life, the colors and textures of my abilities, emotions and experiences to create something singular. I am a work in progress. I can change shape. I can unravel and re-stitch the rows of my existence. I can knit myself anew.

L'dor va dor --- From one generation to the next.  Tyler, wearing a sweater knit my me, his Bubbie.

Embracing the Dissonance ( Again... and again)

There is a picture in an old psychology text-book which has haunted me since I was a very young woman. In a square, in black and white, appears what seems to be the outline of a young woman. The caption beneath the picture informs me that if I look at this image in a different way, I will see an old woman. What I see when I look at this image is supposed to reveal something about my psychological make-up. I recall, as a freshman in college, spending hours gazing at this picture, sometimes finding myself face to face with the maiden and at other times staring at the crone. What I could never do not matter how hard I tried was to see both images clearly and simultaneously.

It is the struggle to bring opposing forces into a clear and harmonious vision that has spurred me on in much of my inquiry about life, teaching and learning. Questions about duality and paradox have always captivated me. My greatest need in life has been to wrest from opposites a tenuous agreement to co-exist. Whether contemplating different aspects of myself or trying to understand my relationship with others, I have found that I must constantly remind myself not to limit my perception to one point of view. This takes constant practice, persistent vigilance and enormous energy.

Such persistence and vigilance has been necessary for my survival during my first year of retirement. It has been incredibly difficult for me to forge a new identity for myself outside of the classroom after having been a classroom teacher for my entire adult life. Who am I as a person and an educator? What knowledge do I have that is valuable to others? What kinds of relationships should I forge with my former colleagues, with my former students? What kind of work can I continue to do in the world that will allow me to continue to engage in tikkun olam -- work that transforms society and aims to heal the world?

Years ago, during my first sabbatical when I entered the doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, I learned the lessons of inquiry and reflective practice. I learned how to find the points of intersection between the theory I was reading and my practice. From Nel Noddings, I learned a new language - the language of ethical caring to describe the stance I took towards my students. From Sarah Lightfoot Lawrence, I learned a new way of thinking about respect in the classroom -- the kind of egalitarian and democratic respect that existed outside of hierarchical positions of power; one that was derived from teachers and students shared humanity. From Maxine Greene, I learned about the unfinishedness of each individual, how each of us is her own existential project and from Paulo Freire, I learned to stop thinking of knowledge as something I had to deposit into my students, but rather as something we, teacher and students could co-construct through our mutual inquiry.

Outside of the classroom fifteen years ago, rooted in a research university, I was able to connect the work of my classroom to broader issues of educational reform and social justice, which in turn, fostered for me a new set of difficult questions.

What is the responsibility of teacher once recognize injustice? What are the ways in which we can and should act as advocates for our students? Should we be agents of change? What positions do we take vis a vis out students and "the public?" Do we engage in a deadly game of high stakes educational triage, "saving" the "salvageable"
and leaving the mortally wounded behind? Do we work to help a select few "get out" of poverty and "overcome" racism leaving the mortally wounded behind? Or do we join forces with others to ERADICATE poverty and racial injustice for everyone and to make sure that there are no communities in America that people should need to "get out" of.

When I was younger I used to believe that the answers to complex questions could be found through the compromise of opposing ideas. For the past fifteen years, I have been learning that such a compromise is not only unattainable; it's undesirable. The lesson I must continue to learn is to accept the presence of contradictions as part of a larger truth. The questions that I brought back to the classroom after my year in graduate school fueled my learning and kept pushing me deeper into the context of my own classroom and wider to the outer reaches of public policy and school reform. But in the process, I kept bumping into more and more paradoxes. And like the young woman I used to be, taking on the optical challenge presented in my psychology text, I found myself still asking: can a teacher be what Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankel has called a "tragic optimist" or what Derrick Bell has described as a "pessimist without despair?" As teachers can we continue to struggle against overwhelming obstacles while finding joy in the moments of individual triumph?

Throughout the years, my classroom and my students, like my home and my family have kept me grounded. Books, filled with theories and grand ideas have allowed me to soar high above the small spaces I occupy. It has been inquiry, with its constant questioning and searching for meaning which has provided the ballast. Just as thoughtful reflection has kept me from being mired down in the muck of daily minutiae, it also prevents me from flying off into some distant place, where ideas exist in a vacuum and theories crystallize into icy ideology.

During my sabbatical year, fifteen years ago, I relearned the lessons I have been learning all of my life. I returned to the classroom and continued to learn and to grow and to provide fertile and generative spaces for my students to do the same. Now, as I near the end of my first year out of the classroom and officially in retirement, I have new questions. What is the relationship between theory and practice when one no longer has a classroom? How can a retired classroom teacher fashion a practice in which she can do good work, continue to learn with and from others, build new relationships, practice respect and an ethic of care? What will keep me grounded now that my children are grown and I have no students?

I am not sure I have the answer to those questions just yet. But now at age 56, more crone than maiden, I am able to do something I could never do before: I can stare at that picture and see BOTH women at the same time. I can hold the tensions of opposites; I can see the bigger picture; and I can trust that I will find/make a way to embrace the dissonance again and again as I continue to figure out how to do good work in the world.