Friday reflection
The lenses we choose to look through
Welcome. This week’s reflection, below — content I’ve created for paid subscribers — explores the stories we tell ourselves about the week that was, and the lens(es) through which we choose to look back. I’ve included an audio option if you prefer to listen vs. read.
If you aren’t yet a paid subscriber, I invite you to enjoy some posts from the archives, and check out my post on LinkedIn earlier this week, about staring down the barrel of the b-word: bragging.
Listen to this week’s reflection
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"Mapping our conversations" is written on the page of a journal, next to a pen
Imagine a map, created in a visual style that appeals to you down to your toes: blocky black lines drawn in Sharpie, for example, or soft, watercolor currents.
Now imagine the last conversation you had, and imagine that you mark it down somehow — a dot, a scribble, a smiley face.
Next, recall your next-most-recent conversation, and the one before that, and so on. Imagine drawing lines in your desired style connecting each of these conversations, until you have a conversation map of the week that was.
Now imagine overlaying a geographical map. Where were all these people you talked to? Were they in a 1-mile radius? Were they all over the globe?
I wonder what our experience of life would be if we had a map like this as an artifact of our week, rather than, say, a to-do list, or a page of our calendar — focusing us on relationship and human connection as the primary narrative thread, rather than productivity or the passage of time.
Here are some of the conversations that would show up on my map:
I’m sitting in my home office in New York’s Hudson Valley, air conditioner on full blast, talking with a woman from Chicago, who is currently sitting in a Tanzanian cafe; it’s the latest stop on a trip that her family is taking around the world. She’s seeking my guidance as part of preparing for the next chapter of her career, beginning next year, when they’re back home.
I’m sitting in my car in a strip mall parking lot in Peekskill, NY, leeching off of Starbucks’ wifi, because I’m in the middle of a challenging phone conversation with two colleagues, each in a different time zone, and I keep losing my cell signal. They are patient with me. Eating a “kitchen sink” cookie from the nearby Panera, where I peed before realizing there was a Starbucks, makes my taste buds happy even as my heart feels vulnerable, and my mind keeps reminding me that my husband has been solo parenting for hours and I really need to get home.
I’m sitting across a round, brown, standard-issue classroom table while a woman who works for the local school district reviews the registration forms I’ve filled out to enroll my daughter in school this fall. I compliment their signage: “It was so easy to figure out where to go.” She smiles a wry smile, and tells me I’d be surprised how many people get it wrong. Getting out of my car in the parking lot, I’d passed a woman sitting in hers, windows down, eating her lunch and reading a book. “Looks nice,” I’d said, and she had smiled politely, obviously eager to get back to her own world.
“These are the people in my neighborhood,” Mr. Rogers used to say, and imagine if his neighborhood had spanned the whole world. I wish he were here, actually, to draw us a map of how to be connected with each other, in these times.
But since he isn’t, we have to draw our own.
Luckily, we are mighty forces.
Amanda