May 26, 2015 – Caring about caring

[I wrote this post while on an airplane to Kauai over the weekend. I’m posting it from here, while listening to the Hawaiian birds and feeling the balmy air on my skin.  I am taking a break from recording an audio version while on vacation.  I’ll resume when I’m back.]

On election night in November of 2008, while waiting for the outcome, I painted. I was finishing up a painting I ended up giving the name “Blossoming Hope” and listening to a conference call.  Ali Brown, a business coach, was interviewing a woman named Alison Armstrong. The talk was billed as:  “Stop Trying to Be a Man in Your Business! The Power of Femininity in the Workplace.”  I was hungry to understand – and (still am) seeking to fully grasp how I can be feminine – be in the feminine and still pursue my endeavors in the world.  Since building and growing are inherently action-oriented – squarely in the masculine, being an entrepreneur in a way that is grounded in the eternal, the yet-to-be manifest, being receptive and expectant continues to be somewhat an elusive balance!  After that, Ali Brown drifted away for me, but I’m forever grateful I was in her world for a while, as it was she who led me to my beloved Alison.

My relationship with myself, my husband, my work, with so much has transformed because of Alison and the distinctions she makes and shares with the world.  Many of these distinctions have to do with the masculine and the feminine – a theme that seems to have captivated this lifetime of mine. But some of them are more universal, more generally wise and always spiritually sound.  Somewhere along the way I heard her talk about caring. That caring is a resource. My idle thoughts the past few days have picked up on this idea.   What we care about: where we put our concern, our interest – our hearts – seems like something useful to explore.   It seems related to another idea I came up with myself years and years ago.  It occurred to me that how we pay attention and what we pay attention to has an enormous impact on who we are.  Think about it; if you watch for it, you can see it everywhere.

My husband loves baseball.  He reads – pays close attention – to the sporting green and follows along with lots and lots of games. His knowledge of players and their histories and performances is positively encyclopedic!  The games are often on the TV or radio when I’m around, and the sporting green is there for me to read too, but I don’t.  I don’t pay the attention he pays.  I don’t care like he does. But I do care about his caring, so I pay enough attention to engage with him – and I am wearing SF Giants orange fuzzy socks as I type this!  It’s the same with old movies, aviation information, the technicalities of how music is made – largely he is who he is because of what he puts his attention on.  People who pay attention to incidents of crime are more concerned about security; people who are interested in the very best food are more discerning in their tastes than someone who is just fueling their body. What we care about, we pay attention to and it shapes us.

Looking through old photo albums when my college friend Randi was here last year, among the photos of all of us drinking huge margaritas in Tijuana and roller skating in Balboa Park in San Diego, were photos of orchids. I took photos of flowers when I was a teenager!  I noticed them, I paid attention, I cared enough to stop and take pictures, even as I was studying computer science. Some of what we care about has always been there – which for me is flowers and color.  And sometimes it develops over time.

Last week, I talked about how our vision changes, it’s not so much that our eyes alight upon the world differently (though I am still curious about this possibility) as much as it is our attention attuning more carefully than we had in the past.  Part of this is intentional, especially at first, but then we do it unconsciously.  The desire to paint has us learn to see, which then changes where we put our attention in the rest of lives as well.

Caring also gives us capacities we wouldn’t otherwise have.  Doing something that challenges us takes something extra-ordinary from us in order to stick with it. Often, it’s just easier to quit.  The artists in my weekly groups who have been coming to paint, week after week, show an enormous amount of care to their work – in how they work.  If the painting isn’t right to them, it’s not right. Somewhere inside them is an often elusive vision for what the painting is to be.  When they ask for feedback from me, near or at the end, I often hear “am I done?”  They have paid so much attention to the painting that they are often tired of it. And I see over and over again, even in the face of “I’m so sick of this painting” the willingness to go back in and do one or two more things to make it really sing.  Without that caring, the work does not see its full potential.

Caring about our work, and paying attention as we do it, so that we can learn the skills to realize our visions in art, enables us to make work that pleases us and that we can be proud of (or become proud of – see my post about the unwanted within).  And when our work is appreciated by others can fuel the caring in us to make more work.

But caring is not a limitless resource.  Caring takes energy, it’s an investment of our selves.  “Paying” our attention to one thing means we can’t “spend” it on something else.  We cannot possibly care and thus give our attention to all that would benefit from it.  This is not a justification for burying our heads in the sand to the world’s problems as much as it is a call to consciously choose how we do pay attention.  And to know that our caring matters.  What we care about, put our attention to, invest ourselves in is a reflection of us.

I am constantly in the conversation with myself whether I do enough to make the world a better place.  I care about the environment, I care about my relationships with Joe, my family and close friends.  I care that beauty is valued in the world, I care that people feel safe and are free to express themselves.  Looking at what I care about, I see that my life is a reflection of it.  I don’t know how to know if this is “enough.”  But for today it seems like it is.  It’s worth asking ourselves – where do you put your precious attention?  What do you care about?

Aloha,

Cara