January 11, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The right rituals for Future You

In a recent unscripted new year’s message, Tony Robbins explained his theory of personal change. He believes that the actions we take flow from our sense of who we are and the standards we use to judge our experiences.

So Robbins invites his mentees to “raise their standards,” to challenge themselves to expect more from themselves, their relationships, their work life, their fitness training, their finances, and all of the other life areas that people often resolve to address at this time of year.

I’ve been learning about personal finance for about three years, ever since I started my business. One of the most important changes I made two years ago was to set up a line in my budget that I labelled “Future Self.”

The Future Self line eventually became a category, and that category includes items like cash savings, life insurance, and tax-deferred and taxable investments. This is the kind of structure that honors Future Me.

I’m a person who has watched two generations ahead of me struggle, and I don’t want to imitate them. That’s my identity.

Future Self will love me because of the decisions I’ve made during this phase of my life—that’s my standard and expectation.

I have automated the payments that go to Future Self so that I’m less tempted to divert them to surprise expenses; I also check accounts more than the professionals say I should. Those are two of my rituals for now, the first so I can relax, the second until I actually do.

Finally, compound interest is my friend. That’s my win.

Robbins’ voice isn’t my favorite and so I won’t inflict his message on you. But he’s right when he notes that this is the perfect time of year to reassess the practices you repeat, practices that slowly shape your life because they recur and build momentum as they do.

Momentum is a neutral force, but it’s additive. If you’ve ever opened a tall bag of snacks and not devoted your full attention to that moment, momentum can easily take you from a handful of Cheetos or two cookies to orange-dusted fingertips, crumbs around your mouth, and an empty snack bag. Momentum makes quick work of you before you’ve time to catch yourself.

Momentum can also have employees spending 10 hours each day getting to work, working at work, and coming home from work, and doing it again and again for decades until they notice they’re a calendar turn from their retirement decade and they can’t account for the intervening time. That can be us too unless we take the time today to establish better rituals.

Rituals are simply the things we do repeatedly: our habits. They are the bricks of our lives, and it’s worth laying them with care.

August 6, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Reclaiming the menu

Finely diced carrots and celery in separate piles on a light green plastic cutting sheet. In the top right corner is part of a knife blade. — Cooking is a way to make new memories.

I spent several hours on Thursday being filmed at home for a series of short profiles on US Adventists.

As part of the filming process, I cooked dinner for the filmmakers. So halfway through the afternoon, I chopped up a little onion, celery and carrot, a bunch of collards, and potatoes; I simmered green split peas and marinated potatoes for roasting; and I stirred things every so often in between our conversations and takes around the house.

This meal, sauteed greens, split peas, and pesto-seasoned potatoes, is the same meal I prepared for relatives during a deeply traumatizing visit in Texas six years ago. I hadn’t thought about that visit for a long time until this summer, and not until I was choosing what to prepare for my friends did I realize that I wanted to reclaim that menu.

Yesterday evening, I gathered at my local church with a mixed multitude of friends and friends-to-be. We convene a small group every first Friday for music, conversation, and communion. It’s an experiment in community-building, and we’re discovering that there isn’t much community without food.

The meal many Christians now call the Last Supper happened, according to the gospels, on a Thursday night. The menu included bread and wine, and perhaps lamb and herbs as well; we don’t know for sure.

But within a single generation, that meal of bread and wine had become a community memory rite. The early Church began to explain their shared meal with memories of the death of Jesus, and they reclaimed the menu, using it to symbolize his execution, reconnect with each other, and reinforce the mutual service that characterized their community. What could have remained a simple traumatic memory became a full-sense memorial that the community actively celebrated together. They reclaimed that final meal.

We can rewrite some stories with the help of a few hours cooking and friends to hold space with. We can reconfigure symbols that remind us of challenging memories when we have space to re-enact the storyline and a supportive network to reinforce the new experience with. We can do this for ourselves and in our communities, and it doesn’t have to be any more complicated than greens, peas, and potatoes, or plates of bread and cups of wine.

October 22, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Wheatley on Learning Organizations

Let me know if you know who designed this graphic. Thanks! — Please let me know if you know who designed this graphic.

“The Army is an incredibly literate organization. They have internal journals that they use to correspond with one another. They study history carefully. They have a center for Army lessons learned. They document everything. And they have this wonderful process of learning from direct experience called “After Action Review,” in which everyone who was involved sits down and the three questions are: What happened? Why do you think it happened? And what can we learn from it?

“If you were in a good American organization and were able to get those three questions as part of your process, you could become a learning organization. What I observe in our business organizations — even in our public institutions — is that after a crisis or breakdown, or after something worked really well, we don’t get together and say, “Okay, what do we each think happened, and what can we learn from it?” We either take credit for it, or, if it’s an error, we try to bury it as fast as we can and move on.

“We’re not in cultures which support learning; we’re in cultures that give us the message consistently: “Don’t mess up, don’t make mistakes, don’t make the boss look bad, don’t give us any surprises.” So we’re asking for a kind of predictability, control, respect and compliance that has nothing to do with learning.

“So I don’t know how any of these large organizations, both public and private, have a prayer to become a true learning organization, until they move away from these cultures of status and protection and fear of one another. That came real clear to me in the Army.” —Dr. Meg Wheatley with Scott London

Guide the teams you work with through those three questions:

1. What happened?
2. Why do you think it happened?
3. What can we learn from it?

Track what happens over the next six months.

October 21, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Synchroblog: Coming Back to Prayer

This is a contribution to the 2014 Queer Theology Synchroblog under the theme “Coming and Going.” Other contributions will be compiled on the QT site by October 22.

The article I contributed to last year’s synchroblog on creation was based on Genesis 1:2, and I reference it in this piece.

“I, though I saw and heard these things, refused to write for a long time through doubt and bad opinion and the diversity of human words… I spoke and wrote these things not by the invention of my heart or that of any other person, but as by the secret mysteries of God I heard and received them in the heavenly places. And again I heard a voice from Heaven saying to me, ‘Cry out therefore, and write thus!'” —Hildegard von Bingen, Scivias

April 3, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Engagement and Apathy

Sometimes we don’t care because we don’t have to care.

At other times we care not because we wish to, but because questions sprang up around us and our lives were pre-enrolled as evidence; because if we do not speak our own words, who can speak them?

It’s a privilege to participate in a constructive conversation. It’s a separate privilege to be able to throw up deuces and move on whether the conversation is resolved or not.

It’s a privilege to be ignorant, and a greater privilege to stay so. Indifference is more powerful than both states.

Ignorance concedes to new information. Bigotry entrenches against it.

To learn, we open to new facets of reality, more experiences, more souls, integrating them into the knowledge we already have, allowing old and new truths to illuminate each other, and letting the obsolete fall away. Without these cycles of learning, engagement becomes more fury than sound, more self-reinforcing than system-improving.

The OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act. — John Boyd’s OODA loop.

A friend once taught me a military strategic process called the OODA loop: Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action.

Apathy and indifference camp in the Observation zone where information waxes and ignorance wanes. With indifference we can scan a world’s features as if we’re removed from the worlds we watch.

We can stand on the ground in this place, yet imagine our place as the Master Position. In so imagining, we fail to orient, and our decided course moves way off.

To orient, we must de-center ourselves and sense ourselves as part of the field, not beyond it. “You are all notes in the Celestial Symphony,” Neale Walsch has said. “Shall we decline to play the music because one note is no more crucial than another?”

Through apathy and indifference we most often answer “Yes. Yes, if we aren’t the keynote, we’ll decline to play, and we’ll devalue the song.”

I may never understand why this is so.

March 24, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

From the Archives: Spring Cleaning

This article was first published around the March equinox four years ago. Winter 2014 has been long here in Maryland. The clocks have sprung forward and the sunset sprawls wide in the evening—but yesterday it was only 43°F and we’re not yet sure whether spring is here to stay.

“Spring Cleaning” surfaced when I reviewed my March 2010 journals and posts during my birthday month reflections last week, and publishing it again after such a long snow season seems a fitting way to honor this phase in the inexorable turning of the Earth.

Spring Cleaning

When I was small, it was common for people to talk about spring cleaning and mean it literally. We threw open the windows, aired our homes, gave away old clothes, and started walking off any “winter baggage.” I still feel extra fresh during spring, especially when I see the sun hanging in the sky a little longer, and the first few buds breaking out on the branches outside.

I prefer to start my new year in March, rather than in January. By March the mainstream “new year resolution” fever has worn off, and I no longer have to hear what TV breakfast show hosts think I should change about myself. The popular spotlight has moved to some other issue, and I can enjoy my month without a million contradictory voices clamoring for my allegiance. I can be still, and watch the trees.

When the trees outside begin to blossom, they’re not blossoming because someone voted to permit it. The trees follow a pattern that God laid down in their cell biology, a pattern that unfolds via wind, sun, rain, soil, and time. Every spring, after the dead quiet of winter, that pattern pushes out new twigs, leaves, petals. Soon buds open, and fruits appear. Whether humans cultivate the land or leave it to rest, this is a reliable order.

Writer Oriah Mountain Dreamer once presented a graduation speech to her former high school, and she describes how uncertain she was about what to say. (Graduation speeches are notoriously difficult to write: everyone remembers if a speech is bad, but whether it is good or bad, no one remembers what was said.)

Speaking to graduates who were ready to leave their most awkward years behind, she said:

“‘Your parents and teachers and others who care about you, in an effort to prepare you for life, have told you a story about who you are and what you can and should do. Now, it’s your job to sift through all of what you have been given and decide what is useful to you and what is not. Because… a lot of what you have been taught has nothing to do with you.’

There was a short stunned silence followed by a smattering of polite applause.”

I wonder how many parents left that ceremony pleased with this speech! Not even friends like to be told that their opinions aren’t helpful, and all of us grow by being willing to learn. Yet when every passing soul has an opinion about your unfolding, how do you filter the voices?

I think Job’s story is marvelous not only because he didn’t curse God, but also because he didn’t curse his friends. His friends explained his upturned life as just punishment, but God judged that they didn’t have a clue about Job or his circumstances. No doubt they intended well, but their good intentions only gave their words more power to undermine Job’s confidence in the one Authority that held him steady. Instead of cursing his friends, though, Job offered sacrifices for them; he acted in favor of those who believed him wicked and out of step with his Redeemer. He trusted God to balance the scales, and held onto God’s pattern in him.

When I look outside each spring, I see all of creation following its pattern, and I remember this very simple prayer from R. Lionel Blue: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, king of the universe, who has made me as He wanted me.”

What does spring teach you? What are some of the things you do to clear your mind and life as the seasons change?

evolution

Spring Cleaning