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mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

present

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Clearing the cache

Boxes of stacked sepia classic photographs, in rows of three. A uniformed white man is in the center image. Above and to his right are women.
Photo credit: Fabien Barral

Every so often, one of my websites starts to show errors and the technicians “clear the cache.” It did that again last week.

Cache files are created by apps to store commonly used information so it doesn’t have to be generated or downloaded again.” —Lowell Heddings

Over time, browsers accrue a lot of that temporary data, text, images, styles, and code. A growing cache is something like the brain’s memories, storing each experience, hardening around habits, building us shortcuts as we navigate through life every day.

It’s important to remember carefully. And in interpersonal relationships, it can also be useful to flush cached memories from time to time.

Fixing others’ in the past can mean missing who they are in this moment.

For convenience, we might fix somebody in time in a period where their handiwork caused negative results for us. Our cache might justify us in feeling resentment, even after we’ve resolved the issue or mitigated its outcomes.

The cache can just as easily contain pleasant memories as unpleasant ones, and we might be even more reluctant to clear our cache of them because they feel good. Yet there’s still a major benefit to shifting from memory to experience, from past to present.

In the present moment is the only place that real relationship happens.

No matter how much a parent looks warmly at an old photo of their adult child, the version of the child that the photo captured is forever gone.

Even if those parents struggle to view their adult child without nostalgia, it’s only as they make room in their perceptions for the children they have today that they stand the chance of relating person-to-person rather than person-to-projection.

And none of us can compete with others’ projections about us.

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The hardest thing

The hardest thing to do in moments of deep distress is to stay fully present.

It’s hard because the human brain and body learn quickly how to answer attacks they can’t escape: they help us survive by taking us somewhere else, anywhere else but here.

As I’ve mentioned, my brain recently took me away from the current administration by reminding me about The West Wing‘s Jed Barlet. This is a great thing. It’s just not the only thing.

When navigating difficult relationships, what's the difference between neutrality and numbness? It's easy to confuse neutrality with non-variability. Non-variability is often achieved by developing a thick skin—becoming less reactive by keeping more out. And we may become increasingly numb in our quest to never let anything that anyone says get to us. But a higher expression of neutrality connects us more, not less, with the difficult situation. And we may experience intense emotions, or even abrupt and wild swings. But we always return fully to the moment, releasing any hooks to our recent experience. From this position of neutrality, we are able to write the best next chapter. We are fully alive! Fully feeling. And able to fully experience what's happening right now.
From the Execudeck series, on the difference between neutrality and numbness.

“When navigating difficult relationships, what’s the difference between neutrality and numbness?

“It’s easy to confuse neutrality with non-variability. Non-variability is often achieved by developing a thick skin—becoming less reactive by keeping more out. And we may become increasingly numb in our quest to never let anything that anyone says get to us. But a higher expression of neutrality connects us more, not less, with the difficult situation. And we may experience intense emotions, or even abrupt and wild swings. But we always return fully to the moment, releasing any hooks to our recent experience. From this position of neutrality, we are able to write the best next chapter. We are fully alive! Fully feeling. And able to fully experience what’s happening right now.”

We won’t lack opportunities to practice this insight over the next four years. Tomorrow, for instance, I’ll wake up, get on the train to the office, and parse how the administration’s latest orders on crime affect my communities.

I can respond to this challenging now by taking a breath before I begin, interrupting the reflex to tighten up and lock down, insisting on a pause to feel, and disrupting the bio-neurological default to flee the present.

I don’t want to do my work numb, and I don’t want to get to 2020 carrying a hard heart.

Full presence is the hardest thing, and it’s also a gift. As we work to build solutions for the world, I hope more of us will give this gift to ourselves.

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The kind of acceptance that makes change possible

clock close-sup.

The only possible way I could have had my unique set of experiences is by living my life as it is, and that means dying when I die.” —Max Edwards, March 19, 2016

Max Edwards was 16 years old when he died from terminal cancer. A week before his death, Edwards wrote about accepting his prognosis and not resisting the truth that his life would end within months. He wasn’t interested in a dramatic response, he wrote, and he had begun to find the routines of life comforting.

Edwards stayed focused on the ever-emerging present, and that made it easier for him to adjust as his body function declined.

Making room in our lives for today means not fleeing to the past and not projecting into the future. Today, after all—in “this present moment”—is where we have the greatest capacity to act.

Angel Kyodo Williams once wrote, “Acknowledging our past is necessary; living in it is a form of escape.” Williams also wrote this: “When we get too stuck in the past or future, the quality of right now suffers. In fact, you miss now altogether. And if life doesn’t happen right here, right now, when does it?”

In my personal and professional lives, I’ve usually been the person on the room who’s most happy planning, structuring, measuring, and scheduling. Life has a lot of fun with that! (I think of the saying “We plan. God laughs.”)

What I’m still learning is how to leave room in my plans for God’s laughter and life’s adaptations. Allowing the present into my awareness without immediately trying to corral it into my timetables and long-term plans—that takes patience I’m not always motivated to exercise.

But I’m learning that I benefit a lot when I pause long enough to pay close attention, to really listen, to really look, to allow myself the space to absorb what I notice and learn from it.

Exhaustion is the result when we use energy in mulling over the past with regret, or in trying to figure ways to escape a future that hasn’t even come yet. Likewise, setting up an image of the future and anxiously hovering over it for fear that it will or won’t come true uses all of our energy and leaves us unable to live today. Yet living this day is the only way to have a life.” —Nar-Anon Family Groups, Helping