relationships : mackenzian

May 7, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Poisoned wells and expectations

In the second season of the Wachowskis’ web series Sense8, there’s an exchange between the ever-earnest Capheus and a television anchor.

“I drive a bus,” Capheus tells the anchor. “If I didn’t take people where they hired me to take them, I wouldn’t expect them to get back on my bus. We expect leaders to take us where we want to go. The problem, it seems to me, begins when they don’t, when things do not improve and yet these leaders keep expecting us to get on their bus. I think this is when leaders become something else.”

“What?” the anchor asks.

“Politicians.”

Broken electoral trust has been a perennial topic over the last year. In the UK, in the US, in Turkey, and most recently in France, voters, activists, and politicians too have debated whether the leaders jockeying to become head of state have earned respect or trust.

Mostly, the consensus is no. And people struggle with what to do after acknowledging that the communal well has been poisoned.

I heard apathy and uncertainty from more British friends and relatives than I expected during Brexit season last year. Most of my US friends were resigned to voting but a substantial percent of the electorate either couldn’t or didn’t.

Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis recently broke the stakes down in a video on France’s second round presidential elections for Open Democracy (English captions).

France did choose Macron this weekend, and Varoufakis and others will be watching to see whether the country’s Left follows through with the second half of the strategy: challenging the new incumbent now that they’ve dodged his opponent.

“We’re not looking for a politician,” local party members tell Capheus in the show. “We’re looking for a leader.”

Off-screen and in this world, millions and millions of ordinary people are too.

January 14, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Bringing social change home

A white row boat on light blue ripply water. — Photo credit: Oliver Cole

Over the last fortnight, I’ve been taking some refuge in Aaron Sorkin’s early 2000s television series The West Wing.

It’s one of the few shows I ever watched live before getting rid of my TV altogether, and it brims with optimism about governance, civic service, and the people who work in the public sector. It exposes the negotiations that mark relationships between the branches of the US government, between executive agencies, between the Cabinet and the Office of the President, and between the government and the public via the press.

And it’s also dialogue-dense, which lends its characters to share parables like this over soundtracks of sober orchestral music:

You remind me of the man that lived by the river. He heard a radio report that the river was going to rush up and flood the town, and that the all the residents should evacuate their homes.

But the man said, ‘I’m religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.’

The waters rose up. A guy in a rowboat came along and he shouted, ‘Hey, hey you, you in there. The town is flooding. Let me take you to safety.’

But the man shouted back, ‘I’m religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.’

A helicopter was hovering overhead and a guy with a megaphone shouted, ‘Hey you, you down there. The town is flooding. Let me drop this ladder and I’ll take you to safety.’

But the man shouted back that he was religious, that he prayed, that God loved him and that God will take him to safety.

Well… the man drowned. And standing at the gates of St. Peter he demanded an audience with God.

‘Lord,’ he said, ‘I’m a religious man, I pray, I thought you loved me. Why did this happen?’

God said, ‘I sent you a radio report, a helicopter and a guy in a rowboat. What the hell are you doing here?'” —Father Thomas Cavanaugh

This is a story worthy of sermons and email forwards circa 1999. I love it anyway.

Some of my most strongest revelations have come through my relationships with other people. And as hard as I’ve worked in my jobs, these relationships are also where I’ve done my hardest work.

Our relationships, the people we touch, and the experiences we have with them are where abstractions squeeze into reality. Fair wage chants become determining the hourly rate for an intern. Ideas about gender equality become how I interact with everybody, the expectations I have for how we communicate, who I think should assert themselves and how I judge them as they do.

In the end, the bigger work might not be nudging the big boat of society in new directions, though of course we have to do that; the scale of issues like climate change is too large not to do it.

The bigger work might be dismantling social structures at work in us and expressing in our personal lives and our interactions with other people. It might be learning to recognize God in the radio report, the helicopter, and the guy in the rowboat, and changing our reflex to de-prioritize them all.

September 23, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

If a boundary falls in the forest…

"Boundaries don't work when the other person involved doesn't know what your boundaries are." —Nar-Anon Family Groups — (c) Nar-Anon Family Groups

Developing sound boundaries and expectations is a basic part of building relationships, whether personal or professional. The process doesn’t work well unless there’s open communication.

Confusion and frustration easily result when one party is operating by one set of rules and their peer is using another. Even ways of dissolving relationships like ghosting (disappearing without prior explanation) are a sign that parties aren’t working with the same set of boundaries or expectations of each other.

Perhaps there’s something else in play as well: our beliefs about fairness.

[Retributive] systems instill and reinforce the notion that when harm is done what’s most important is to find who’s at fault and punish them… Restorative justice rests on the notion that when harm is done what’s most important is to repair the harm as far as possible and to restore the community from the loss of trust that ensues when harm is inflicted.” –Miki Kashtan

Restoration can’t emerge in relationships that involve not only broken trust but also unilateral boundaries.

We get to talk through our thoughts, limits, and expectations with each other. This open communication doesn’t guarantee that all parties will understand or agree. But the act of sharing over time can yield a listening-learning relational space for people who might otherwise be tempted to enforce each other’s rule compliance or judge one another’s failures.

To thrive in relationships, we’ll often need the courage to simply acknowledge what we want rather than fail to share our positive values or or the boundaries we’re willing to live with. Anything less isn’t really fair, not to others, and not to us.

August 19, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Getting your own way

A healthcare CEO sometimes asks other executives to examine how fast they move to quash disagreement and other kinds of relational discomforts.

“Do you sacrifice reconciliation for resolution?” —Curt Nonomaque

From the ExecuDeck: "THE QUESTION Do you sacrifice reconciliation for resolution? WHY IT MATTERS When dealing with an uncomfortable situation, we may experience a strong urge to fix the problem quickly and make things right. This often causes us to resolve the issue without actually achieving reconciliation—and the relationship suffers. Other times we can’t find a way to resolve an issue, and our discomfort causes us to miss opportunities to achieve reconciliation. Reconciliation doesn’t require resolution." — Text by Curt Nonomaque; art by Dave Cutler (CC-by-NC-ND)

I thought of Curt and this question as I read a thread about networking on LinkedIn this week.

“I have received very positive responses even from cold contacts,” the writer said. “However, most offer to help via email first and plan a meeting [later] in case their help via email isn’t clear enough. How do I convince a cold contact for a meeting when he offers help via email first?”

I reflexively bristled at the idea that contacts need convincing to fit our expectations of how best to connect.

I also understand the LinkedIn writer’s uncertainty. It can be so easy to privilege what I want from an interaction and to insist on it right now rather than consider what others in relationship with me might want or what our relationship needs to evolve and flourish long term. We might shoot for the immediate goal, whether that’s securing their agreement, locking down a hire, or resting in the simple satisfaction of completing a planned process.

It’s a lot harder to acknowledge the demands of those immediate goals and still hold the relationship with the gentle neutrality of a gardener whether or not those short-term goals are met.

Ultimately, there’s no need at all to rush or manipulate connection. And more: the desire to control what happens between two parties today can be the thing that most limits what could emerge between them tomorrow.

Seeking to control not only limits our ability to listen to what another person might be saying to us through word or action; it also stymies our ability to receive life’s surprises. Opportunities and experiences we couldn’t have developed on our own can meet short- and long-term goals when we’re willing to back up enough to let them bubble up to the surface.

Managers and leaders and teachers and mentees and partners and workers and friends—all of us navigate this question in some way. We all experience temptations to try to over-determine how things unfold.

Value your relationships more than you value getting your own way in relationships, and see how much room life makes for you. My bet? More room than you could have planned.

July 1, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Ending Well

Life is as much endings as it is beginnings and maintenance.

But I never got taught how to close things down, and entrepreneurs don’t easily tell the stories of the business ideas that failed or the companies that folded. We talk about startups, not shutdowns. We teach whole courses about how to get new jobs, and none about how to leave old ones.

There’s a bias toward Genesis and origin stories, and it won’t always serve me.

As the wild animals in my yard taught me recently, every process has two ends and a middle: birds that ingest seed will also digest it and egest it. I can’t contribute to the ingestion stage and expect to escape its outputs!

So too with writing, and projects, and relationships of all kinds: I can’t build a life on beginnings alone and also need to learn to end things well.

Please share your how-to-handle-endings wisdom with me on Twitter.

June 21, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Divesting in order to re-invest

When we move beyond our aspirational tales about fictive kinship and we-are-family, we gain the space to examine exactly what solidarity means.” —One of us“

When kinship hasn’t also meant solidarity, I’ve felt such a sense of betrayal. It just feels wrong when people I know I have a deep, existential relationship with use their energy to work against my thriving.

The culture of “unfollow, unfriend, and block” tells me that I should demonstrate self-respect by cutting people off. I see that as a possible emergency solution, but not a routine one.

If “we’re one,” cutting others off is like performing a live dissection and more torture than healing. I haven’t learned how to do it well. And I’m not sure that I wish to. I do think we should learn to close relational chapters well, but I don’t think that means carving others out of my life.

So what are my options? (Continuing mistreatment isn’t in the budget.)

I’ve been re-reading the gospel accounts of Jesus; after all, if anyone could speak to inner circle folks becoming life- and joy-threatening liabilities, he’d be the one.

In Matthew 12, Mark 3, and Luke 8, Jesus has just called his named disciples and is teaching the public. He has already stressed the Sabbath police, attracted regional crowds, and taught the parable of the sower—which is a parable about being generally accessible yet only selectively received.

Matthew and Luke are vague about Jesus’s family’s intentions, but Mark explicitly says that they’ve come to “take charge of him.” They’ve come to do an intervention, and someone tells him they’ve arrived.

“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers,” he replies, a little more brusque than a Jamaican parent would have allowed. “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35).

Given the care with which Jesus engages his mother in his last life chapter, it makes no sense to see this saying as a cold block. It makes a lot more sense to see Jesus destabilizing the sacred definitions of kinship: divesting himself of his relatives so that he can re-invest in them in a new way.

Jesus lays down his parent and siblings so that he can form new kinship relationships that respect what he’s committed to. That new family system includes everyone aligned with his lifework, including his parents and siblings once they can gather themselves and drop the belief that he’s a walking demon-vessel.

It’s not much to ask, really, that your kin stop viewing you through the lens of their suspicion that you’re carrying water for Satan. It’s hard to do a road-trip (and life is one big road trip) with a suspicion that big in the middle seat.

How I’ve heard this saying taught is as permission to dissect a family into believer and unbeliever; into trustworthy and dangerous-and-waiting-to-draw-you-into-moral-deception.

I don’t see it that way. I see it as encouraging me, us, to reconsider the logic of our relationships, to value our deepest callings and integrity enough to invite those we love to participate with us, to accept their limitations enough to leave them in their lane if that’s what they prefer, and to revise the way we engage them, but not abandon them entirely. After all, our families, our kin, aren’t the only people we serve.

I draw comfort from our glimpses of Jesus’s parent close by at the end of his life, and of his relative James giving his energy to the early church.

We don’t know how long it took them to go from “He is out of his mind” to full-bodied commitment. But they made that journey. And only because Jesus was willing to allow the original relationships to dissolve so that new relationships could form.

I’m learning from the Master.