Embracing Abundance: (long) May* Edition
[* by which I mean this is an update on everything from the end of April through the first week of June]
A truth about me: I hate starting with a blank document.
I will duplicate a file that has nothing to do with what I’m writing, rather than start with that terror: The White Screen.
When I sat down to tackle what I want to say about my very busy last month, I thought I’d see what the AI frenemy of the moment, ChatGPT, suggested for a blog post about how I embraced abundance in my relationships.
Then I giggled, because it gave me a 5-paragraph essay outline like I was in middle school English class (literally: “Introduction” + 5 topics + “Conclusion”) and subheads that seem to come from every commodified self-help product out there right now. And yet, they’re not really wrong either. I’m scrapping all the AI-generated body content, but for funsies, I’m going to use the subheads as a little writing prompt challenge and frame my update that way.
Pro tip: use the external resources at your disposal to help you where you want help (like how to avoid starting with a blank doc) AND creative constraints are your friend to start narrowing down a wide open field of possibilities.
Recognizing Scarcity Mindset
I’ve written about how 2023 is my Cornucopia Year, and the central question I’m considering this year is:
How can I turn toward and foster abundance?
I think we all understand how easy it is to focus on scarcity, how it can feel easy and satisfying to think about what we lack and what we are striving to attain.
I know that’s true for me, as I’m building up an independent business that doesn’t follow an established path. It’s easy to look at the low bank balance or the uncertainty of future contracts or the unknown road ahead of me and feel like I wish I were more _________ (financially stable, certain of coming success, settled into what exactly my business looks like… fill in lots of existential phrases in that blank).
I’m trying to do the opposite of that scarcity focus this year. I’ve looked at the quarters of this calendar year and given myself a different zone of life in which to CELEBRATE ABUNDANCE in each quarter.
Q1 (January-March) was celebrating financial abundance as a COMMUNITY BUILDER (I like having lots of words and phrases as guides).
Q2 (April-June) is celebrating relationship abundance as a (RE)CONNECTER.
This long May included my first in-person retreat, Work/Life, international romps with friends through Rome and Vienna, small-group coaching with the guides who lead public tours at the MFABoston, and my 20-year college reunion with another set of dear friends.
So here’s a recap of these goings-on.
Shifting Perspectives
This is a pretty apt phrase for what I wanted folks to get out of the Work/Life retreat. I framed this as a day to reorient how our work meets our lives, to address what we want work to look like in this time of turmoil and change. Based on the feedback I got from the day, that mission was accomplished.
The responses I got said things like,
“I’m leaving our time together thinking about how I can approach life differently, with new perspective”
and
“I surprised myself by getting a new perspective than I usually have.”
Since the folks at this retreat were coming from different fields, levels of experience, and life situations, I was clear from the start that the day wasn’t about concrete job-specific steps to take next. I asked them each to bring a focal question that’s relevant to where they are right now.
One person was trying to figure out how work might look more intentional as their kid leaves the house in a few years. One person wanted to make sure their post-grad-school “passion” job didn’t take over their whole life. Someone else was sitting comfortably in a role they’d had for years and wrestling with whether that comfort was something they wanted or maybe needed to push out of. Another person was looking for a change of field after their last work left them feeling burned out and taken for granted.
Any of that sound familiar?
Yeah, I’ll bet.
To me, too.
We hunkered down out of the pouring rain in a gorgeous production designer studio in Brooklyn, and we talked and wrote and played our way through a bunch of different exercises.
I led folks through new ways we can introduce ourselves holistically and tell our own stories without limiting how we think and feel about our work.
We talked about values that have been important to us in the past, that we hold to for now, and that we aspire to move into more deeply in the future.
We used a bunch of different card decks throughout the day to offer prompts and frameworks for how we might move into those aspirational values.
The very talented Kyle Marian joined us to take headshots, and everyone got to play around with the studio props and backdrops to make an environment that represented their most aspirational value. Kyle encouraged us all to make our headshots a visual storytelling opportunity, just as we’d been writing and talking about how we tell our self-story.
Here’s mine. My aspirational value was ADVENTURE. How do you think I did?
By the end of the day, everyone left with a zine they’d made throughout the day that held their own values, resources, questions, and affirmations to move ahead. I offered a framework that encouraged people to find motivating questions and sources of inspiration for themselves, and that felt really good.
The folks who came described the day as “meaningful, rejuvenating, and thoughtful” “motivating, relaxing, illuminating”.
As far as my own shifting perspective? Yeah, that happened, too. Normally, I’m quick to move past what worked and focus on what I could do better next time. Ahead of this retreat, I set myself the goal of celebrating the abundance aspects of it first.
So I let myself appreciate it when one person said,
“This retreat gave me the chance to put some structure around thinking about what I want to focus on in the years ahead.”
Instead of starting to immediately second-guess myself after it was over, I made sure to focus on what had gone well.
And you know? The second-guessing never came. Not the next day, not weeks later, not now. Are there little things I’ll tweak and shift when I offer this retreat again? Sure. (And yes, for those of you who’ve asked me, I will offer this retreat again, hopefully in some different locations… nominate where you’d like to attend it in the comments below!)
But I never truly doubted that it went well, and that honestly took me—a trying-to-recover perfectionist—by surprise.
I’ll leave off talking about this retreat with another quote from a participant that still makes me smile, and that matches so well with the vision I have for my own work right now:
“Rachel is a thoughtful facilitator. She is well read and has a great deal of tools in her toolbox to help others move through the challenges and opportunities life hands each of us.”
Cultivating Open Communication
You know, ChatGPT, I wasn’t thinking about how this is an aspect of embracing abundance, but it is indeed part of what has been fostering abundance in my relationships in recent projects.
The ongoing work I’m doing with the guides at the MFABoston is an example of the vein of my projects that help institutions make change within. They’re bringing back drop-in group tours in the museum in a way that’s really thoughtful and rigorous, after COVID put a stop on in-person tours for a few years.
There’s an ongoing education and training program that encompasses both collections information and education pedagogy. There’s a clear rubric of what’s expected on tours. There’s a mandate across the museum to focus on inclusive language and tools to foster belonging.
I’ve been spending hours in their galleries with a dedicated team of full-time staff from multiple departments, offering small-group coaching on how to engage visitors with objects in the collection. The goal is to look from new perspectives, tell new stories, and interact with museum-goers in new ways.
I’ve previously led training sessions for these guides, and it’s now heartening to see them taking their new learnings to the galleries. Building those relationships with them has let me offer both compliments and constructive suggestions to this group of dedicated guides who are taking in the spirit of learning and growing with impressive openness.
Open communication is something that can’t be forced or rushed (I’m reminded of Anne Helen Petersen’s recent Substack thread about what in our lives is UNoptimizable), and it goes in multiple directions.
Because, in addition to feeling good about making progress with change in the museum based on what I can bring them, I’m also feeling good about the openness of their feedback to me.
Just yesterday, one of them told me that my trainings were the first time she’d really been encouraged to try something new and experimental, and it pushed her to consider a new way of presenting a very familiar artwork. Another wrote the following after a session with them:
“This was a great way to bolster our confidence to reimagine and expand our tour perspectives and purpose as we prepare to head back to the galleries. Spending time learning with Rachel is a gift we receive... unwrap it and share it with joy!”
In addition to being lovely to hear such positive feedback, I’m warmed by the affirmation that people are valuing what I have to offer. That’s not always something that’s easy for me to sit with. It’s like I said above: I’m very quick to take positive feelings in stride and quickly move on to what I can do better next time.
My Q2 focus on embracing abundance in my relationships has been a filter that’s helped me sit with this kind of deeply meaningful affirmation and internalize it more fully.
And by sitting with it and internalizing it, I’ve noticed an increase in the warmth of my feelings toward the people who say it. Open communication flowing both ways has helped me be more consciously appreciative of the relationships in my life, whether they’re deep or surface-level, personal or professional, or combinations of all of the above.
Embracing Authenticity
I know the idea of a college reunion might not feel like a place to embrace authenticity for many reading this. I know “reunion” can easily conjure the idea of performing the best of yourself, of proving to people who you haven’t seen in years that your life is exciting and cool and all-around great.
My 20th Wellesley College reunion weekend was emphatically NOT that.
While it’s true that I’ve enjoyed all my reunions, they’re not all the same. They’ve each been marked by a different general observation about how my peers and I seem to relate to each other and to our own lives.
This fourth reunion—the first one since COVID and one that’s coming in the middle of another round of impassioned debate over Wellesley’s gender policy—was notably a reunion where people brought their stories of the last five years; happy, sad, frustrating, confusing, and more.
Many people came without partners and kids, sometimes because they’d separated from those partners since our last reunion, sometimes because they were able to make good on the chance to be at college again without the additional responsibilities of parent- and partnerhood. Lots of people had stories of the professional and personal challenges they’d been through since the last time we gathered in 2018.
I didn’t talk to anyone who seemed to feel the need to pretty up their life. Many more conversations focused on the real-life choices people have made, with their positive and negative outcomes, all in one. People who’d had kids later than they’d planned talked about giving up careers they loved to be full-time parents for at least a little while. Other people who’d had kids early were approaching the excitement and anxiety of college decisions for those kids. People had changed jobs or entire career fields, changed gender identities, lost family members, struggled through medical diagnoses, didn’t feel like their lives were quite where they wanted them to be, felt like they were living more truthfully as themselves than they’d ever done before.
Maybe we were all just 40-somethings with a wider perspective on life under our belts. Maybe we were all confronting a big drop in the amount of social stamina we had for making empty small talk, and we wanted to get to the meatier stuff. I know I felt both of those things. I speak at least for myself when I say that I really appreciated the authenticity and honesty of the conversations I had with old friends. Even friends I hadn’t seen in five years. Even when we mutually acknowledged that we’d have these great conversations and then not see each other again for five more.
I was pretty open about the uncertainty and promise of the path I’m on, myself. I still wouldn’t say I’ve got a neat elevator pitch of a way to talk about what I’m doing now, but I’m a whole lot clearer on it now than I was this time last year. My “what do I do” answer clarifies the more I say it and the more varied projects I do, and I wasn’t afraid to share all of that with folks at reunion.
I had three separate people (two fellow alums and a former professor) tell me that they’d always thought of me as someone who proactively found new ways to proceed when things weren’t working as-is. Like the feedback from MFABoston guides I’ve been working with, these comments were things I was able to internalize and appreciate more honestly, here in my embracing relationship abundance place.
I talk a lot about how changemaking is like planting seeds. You may not be there to see the results of that seed, but you never know which seed you plant may eventually be the one that takes root and grows to lushness.
It was nice to hear from people at reunion about moments we shared during college that had been those seeds for them, even if I wasn’t thinking of them as seeds at the time.
Nurturing Connections
And that brings me to the last example I want to share here of embracing abundance in relationships throughout this (long)May.
After months of planning and anticipation, I met up with six friends for ten days of exploring around Rome and Vienna, in various combinations.
This particular septet hadn’t all been together since 2019, and it was lovely to variously stay up late, eat all the pasta and gelato and profiteroles, discover new saints and ancient roads, and drink aperitivi in fine company.
Various people headed home in differing combinations, and my Vienna outing was with one of these lovely friends. We shared a TINY overnight train bunk and a funky moon-themed hotel room, as well as several days of meandering, pastry consumption, and watching the Eurovision Song Contest on tv.
When it’s done well, travel is a mind- and heart-expanding experience, and this was that, for sure. This group included the people who I spent the most time online with during the hardest months of COVID. A group who supported each other through the hardships, illnesses, isolations, and milestones of the early 2020s. We don’t all live in the same place (this year we were based in three different countries and four time zones), and I am enormously grateful that everyone shared the feeling of importance around prioritizing making time together.
This trip was able to happen precisely because of the international spread and interests that are part of why I love these friends. These are people who have lived in countries where they don’t speak the local language, who have traveled both together and independently, who live curious and unconventional lives.
I am one of those people, too.
Making unconventional choices about my work and life isn’t always easy and can often be lonely and stressful. But it’s how I lead my most adventurous life
And that, after all, is the value I picked as my aspirational lodestone at the Work/Life retreat.
“The word adventure comes from the Latin meaning ‘about to happen’, which sums up the thing I love best about being away from home. The feeling that something exciting might be just around the next corner. Even if that thing is only an average Airbnb or a bout of food poisoning. The word ‘adventure’ has associations of chance and luck and the best trips feel like this too.”—Kate Wills, A Trip Of One’s Own
This array of busy (long)May happenings is part of what has brought me adventure. The plethora of bonding experiences I had with the people I spent time with this month was a whole panel of adventures. An abundance of them. I’m glad to have them all feeding me and bringing me new lessons and learnings and seeds that I may not recognize right now, but that will grow into their own sustaining cornucopia at some unknown point in my future.
And now I’ve got to share with you the final sentence that ChatGPT suggested to me, because it makes me laugh and kind of sing-song it in my head to myself. If you want to join me, think Rainbow Connection or something similar:
Let us all embark on this journey of abundance, and together, create a world enriched with love and meaningful relationships.
🤔🌈🤔
Let us all embark on this journey of abundance, and together, create a world enriched with love and meaningful relationships. 🤔🌈🤔
Creative Prompt Coda: Think of one minor, mundane task that you dread. See if a randomly selected Oblique Strategy can help you make a change to it.
