Today is Santino’s fifth birthday; somebody must have known, since a neighbor we haven’t yet met delivered a huge, candy-cane shaped chew to our doorstep with a sweet note and the bow of a gift. Yesterday was the celebration for my employer’s sixteenth anniversary since founding. And Friday was our twentieth anniversary. According to people who claim to know, the traditional gift for this many years of being married is china. Given how much of that is in my family already, I’m glad nobody thought to get us more. These milestones have had us in a contemplative space. And busier than usual.
Together, we’ve shared peaks and valleys, but when I stumbled across Susan David’s TED talk, I realized part of our emotional resilience together has been based on looking pain in the eye and sitting with it. Not hurrying past life-long wounds means we’re able to grapple with the new ones as they arise, apparently. The talk rings true enough I thought I’d share it for anyone else who is looking for a way to be more centered and present, despite whatever shitstorm is pending on the horizon. A completely different angle on the strength of our relationship came from reporting on findings out of studies done at Google regarding high-performing teams: Trust makes great things happen.
On the other end of my reading spectrum, I discovered reporting on a study that found men to be intimidated by smart women. The author of Radical Candor, which I read a number of months ago, wrote an opinion piece based on results of a linguistic analysis of women’s performance reviews. It gave both research-based and anecdotal evidence of how women thus face systematic resistance to success–we can’t be assertive without being called abrasive, and that hurts in bottom line results. Then there was the male reporter who described the efforts he undertook over the course of two years to ensure he had gender parity in his reporting. All of these things represent big and ongoing hurdles as I pursue any career. I’m at least glad there are people who have invested the effort to prove it’s not just an individual experience–and that I finally have landed in a place where there is awareness of and pushback against these norms.
I also found a new author. Unfortunately for me (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), Courtney Milan is a prolific writer, and the series that introduced her to me has seven books in it. The prequel novella is free, and sucked me in so thoroughly that I have now read all of the Brothers Sinister books. It was lovely to find an author writing historical romances that overturned a huge number of tropes: Some of her female protagonists were trying to avoid getting married, none of them were the Most Beautiful Of Them All, and they were all deeply intelligent in a variety of ways. If you want your romance with a dash of feminism and an image for how love can heal some profound wounds, Milan is your gal.
The biggest slap in the face, though, came from an article purportedly about time management. The key quote: “Energy and attention are more scarce than time.” The conclusion was: We need to focus on limiting what we prioritize because we will never have more than twenty-four hours in a day, and there will always be periods in those 24-hour segments in which we do not have the energy or attention to actually be productive.
I don’t know why that slight rephrasing caught me so off-guard; I’ve always hammered on time scarcity and the importance of prioritizing. But understanding that the corollary to these limitations is that there are concomitant limits to energy and attention… it’s a visceral realization.
And explains why my editing has fallen off the bandwagon again.
Even our average step-count over the past two weeks has drifted down toward 3,000 again.
At least my first audiobook is starting to show up at some retailers: Nook Audiobooks, Scribd, eStories, Playster, Libro.FM and Downpour. I’ll be curious to see how much longer it takes to get into Audible and iTunes, though I’m anticipating availability there by the end of this week.
We’ll see whether, now that I’m past the social whirl, I’m able to find the energy and attention needed to dive back into edits. In the meantime, here’s the link to my fellow ROW80ers, and I’ll be reporting back again next week with results.