I’ve been lucky enough to have all of my children under one roof for the last couple of weeks – some of those roofs were in Spain which was even more lucky. This gave me a brief window into their conversations, such a delightful connection to who they are now and are becoming as people and as siblings. At one point I heard one of my sons asking my daughter who her best friend is – she is about to start high school, and friends are such an important piece of this transition. I won’t get into the details of her answer, that’s not for me to speak to. 😉 What it got me thinking about is what does it mean to be a best friend? Who are my best friends? And what if I was my own best friend? What would that look like, feel like? Who would I be if I really, truly valued and loved me the way I love my family and friends?

And that brings me back to self-compassion, the third layer of the TransformAble leading from the inside out framework. It’s the piece that, as I shared in my blog post earlier this year, I left out of the framework the first time around. ​

“In any moment, no matter how lost we feel, we can take refuge in presence and love. We need only pause, breathe, and open to the experience of aliveness within us. In that wakeful openness, we come home to the peace and freedom of our natural awareness.”  – Tara Brach

Ever feel like you can’t quite catch up, catch a break or even catch your breath? That has been a space I’ve been occupying lately in fact, I’ve set up camp here. I’ve decorated the walls with mental sketches of what it takes for me to feel productive, good, or simply enough. Lately I’ve had lots of both exciting and difficult to navigate happenings and I’ve found myself with too much to do, too much to take in, just too much. It’s a familiar, and in this way a “comfortable,” place. Yet I know it’s a place where I miss things, I miss whole conversations with family and friends (or my response is so delayed it brings a laugh or worse an eye roll from my teenage daughter), I miss taking in the beauty of my surroundings, I miss experiencing what I’m up to fully, and most importantly I start to miss my life.

As I watched an interview I did with my fellow Northwestern University alum, Dr. Jay Kumar for an episode of the GenConnectU’s series Thriving Brain called Why Are Presence and Awareness Essential for Effective Leadership? I realized that what I’ve really been missing lately is presence. ​

​In last month’s blog post about stories and community I touched on belonging and this month there’s more to say! I tend to lead with my heart if you hadn’t noticed, and belonging is near and dear to me. In fact, of the three basic human needs, safety, belonging, and dignity – my go-to and non-negotiable is belonging. For much of my life I’ve mixed up belonging and fitting in, this meant that belonging was about what others thought of me and how I could “fix” myself to be more liked, more accepted, sometimes just more. I have spent a lot of time proving my enoughness to fit in. Oof, that’s a lot of work and it’s exhausting work because there is a drum beat of “not enough” pounding in the background the whole time I do it. And all this work, as hard and draining as it is, hasn’t and won’t lead to true belonging because it can’t.

​True belonging is not about finding a certain place, group, or situation; instead it's about finding ourselves. True belonging starts within us. It starts with acceptance of who we’ve been, who we are, and who we are becoming. For me this idea of acceptance has been a bit of a bugaboo. I’m very practiced at conditional acceptance, when I do this, look like this, feel like this then …​

"We're wired for story. In a culture of scarcity and perfectionism, there's a surprisingly simple reason we want to own, integrate, and share our stories of struggle. We do this because we feel the most alive when we're connecting with others and being brave with our stories - it's in our biology." —Brene Brown

After posting about time and abundance last month on Leap Day I have continued to get reminders about time and my relationship with it and I realized there is a Part II. 😀 I'm in San Diego for spring break. On a rainy Saturday (not typical here) we explored the San Diego Museum of Art. With every magnificent piece of art I found myself drawn to the description of the piece, specifically the artist, even more specifically the birth and death years. I couldn't stop calculating  ​how long each artist lived. For each artist's life I made a judgment, this life was too short, this life was really long (amazing how many artists I found who lived almost 100 years).

​And the thing is I don't know about the life in the time. The dash between birth and death year. This space in-between is where all of life happens. The numbers don't tell me about that, the numbers tell only the time in the life. I don't know about the joy, the pain, the ups and downs of these artists' lives. And I was reminded again that we are the ones who make the life in the time, we choose to make the time for what matters to us. We create the space in-between, we define the dash!

"Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into."
—Wayne Dyer

Well here we are, February 29 - it's Leap Day and I've posted 6 months in a row! Two amazing things on a single day. 😉 This day has me thinking about "extra space" and "extra time." What does it mean to have more than enough? When it comes to my calendar and my to-do lists, right now it seems like I really truly can't tell you what extra space and time looks or feels like. I'm always squeezing one more thing in, trying to find one extra hour in the day. And now we have a bonus 24 hours, time that won't be available again until 2028. I love bonus time! Every fall when we set the clocks back and we get an extra hour my husband jokes it's my favorite day of the year. And it is in so many ways. It makes me wonder what it would be like to live as if there were enough or even extra time all of the time. To live in abundance. What is it like to leap into an extra time mindset? ​

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."
​— Mary Oliver from Wild Geese

My word for the year is ease. To me it's a comforting and wonderful word - when I hear it I feel my body relax into it. In fact, I tried several other really good words, creativity, purpose, inspiration, and more. All amazing words, and ease was the only one that gave me that feeling of “yes, that’s it.” And I say this after a day of running from thing to thing to one more thing. Plus trying to remember how to create 1099's and then posting this tonight to achieve my goal of blogging for the 5th month in a row! It hasn't felt particularly easeful.​ Hmmm ... I wonder what it looks like to choose ease? 
​
It sounds so good in theory and in reality, I don't want to choose period. I want to do all the things - I'm lucky and privileged enough to be capable, healthy, and loving what I’m up to, therefore I should be able to do it all. Right?! And that's just it, we can't do it all and we includes me. I cannot do it all! Just saying that and letting go of the angst around trying to do it all feels a bit easeful.