May 12, 2015 – Failing and recovering

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When I came back from my stay in Paris in 1996, I settled back here in a house in San Anselmo (in Marin) and worked in San Francisco.  I either took the ferry across the bay to the Ferry Building or the bus across the Golden Gate Bridge.  Not too shabby either way as far as commutes go!  I remember warm evenings in the summer sitting outside on the boat, watching the city draw away from us, feeling the magic of the uncommon warmth (it’s often windy and chilly in the summer on the Bay).   And in the winter, I liked to get a window seat on the left side of the bus, so I could watch the sun set out over the Pacific Ocean as we headed north over the bridge.  I thought to myself:  people travel thousands of miles to see this – and I get to see it all the time.

By about 2003, after meeting Joe, getting married and going through unsuccessful fertility treatments, the magic had worn off.  I remember saying to Donna – who was officially my “therapist” but is what I’d truly call my God mother – that getting on that bus felt like “slamming my soul against a concrete wall.”  I was searching for something else to do for work that would keep me on this side of the bridge. I suggested one day that I could do bookkeeping. To that she said “you are a teacher.” (It is such a gift to have people in our lives that see who we are before we do.)  She pointed me to CTI – the Coaches Training Institute.  She had another client who was going through their program and thought I might be interested.

CTI is one of the best coach training organizations in the world and they are headquartered right here in San Rafael.  I went home and read the curriculum on their website and knew it was me – working with people as they grew into the lives they were called to live was where I wanted put my energy.  It took a couple of years before I started – April of 2005 – a decade ago!  When I was in the third of five courses, one of the leaders saw something in me and asked me to consider doing CTI’s leadership course.  It’s a 10-month, nearly $10,000 program.  Holy cow!  I was scared, of the time and money commitment, but also of what it would ask of me.  I was still gripped by that stage-fright!  I started Co-Active Leadership on my 44^th birthday in November 2005. The “me” that emerged in the next 10 months can never go back inside the box she was held in.  It expanded my consciousness, my sense of self and my impact.  I learned the value of my voice and my point-of-view and the power of creating in partnership.  It’s an amazing program.

We learned practical distinctions that I still call upon all the time.  I’ve been thinking about one of them a lot lately – recovery.  We learned that the deal is not to avoid making mistakes, having missteps, going off track. The deal is how we recover from them.  Through high-ropes exercises with a partner, we got in our bodies how even dangling helpless from a rope, there is a way to pull back up and get going again.  And, that it almost always takes the help of others.

Recovery is not just what we do, it’s a mind-set.  If we expect that things will go awry at some point and we take responsibility for the situation, we have a whole different set of capacities to handle it.  If we hide, deny or crumble under the challenging circumstances, it doesn’t go so well.  It’s hard to do. Our egos don’t like being responsible for what goes “wrong.”  It’s called failure – in our heads and outside them too.  We are geared toward success, but we need to “fail” to be strong.  Even more than that, it’s how it goes in life. We will fail.  We can learn to see failure as a means to learn and grow.

I’m incredibly inspired by Alison Armstrong’s commitment to recovering well.  When she and her husband or other partners in her life “blow up the laboratory,” as she calls it, it is her commitment to work through what happened between them so fully, gaining all the learning and insight from it she can, so that in the end she’s glad it happened. This is recovery in the spirit that we learned in leadership! And it’s given the world Alison’s work – which has brought freedom, understanding and peace to thousands and thousands of relationships.

Of course, these days I look at almost everything through the lens of creativity and how I can be a better teacher.  I am largely self-taught – besides a few workshops and adult ed classes, I learned to paint by finishing every one of my paintings.  When I hit a spot where I thought I’d ruined it, or when it just looks so awful to me that a voice tells me it isn’t worth continuing (and this happens with every painting – still!), I’ve stuck with it and figured out what it needed.  Sometimes help comes from my reference image.  I say to the painters in my groups “we are not slaves to our reference photos, they are our servants.”  The photo, to the best of the camera’s ability, captured the light, the color, the shapes of our subject – in the moment we were inspired by it.  To that end it can be instructive to us in our painting process.  So, I compare the photo to the painting which tells me what’s needed.

I’ve learned to be bold.  Painting Reach! several summers ago, I left the sky for last. I envisioned a smooth lovely wash of blue, but it was a warm day – it was drying fast and ended up all splotchy.  I panicked that I’d ruined it!   I took it out on the metal patio table, got a 3” house painting brush from the garage, mixed up several blues and a violet and slathered the paint on.  Here’s the before and after.  What I ended up with was a “life in full color” sky, and a much stronger painting than if I’d been “successful” with the pale wash.

With August Bounty, I didn’t have a good drawing of the ivy – the image was dark and I couldn’t see to draw it well. I tried to make it up as I painted.  What I had painted was so bad that, though I had ¾ of the ivy painted, I put the whole piece of paper in the kitchen sink and sponged it off.  I dried it flat, took a new, lighter photo of the ivy, re-drew and re-painted it from the start. That’s recovery!  There are some green stains that can be seen through the tan-colored paint over to the right (see the detail photo) – which I think actually makes it a bit more interesting.  And – that I’ve done this has made me a better artist and a better teacher.

I joke often about offering a workshop called “Can this Painting Be Saved?” Artists would bring the work that is tucked away because they don’t like what they’ve done.  We can’t be sure that every painting is one to be “saved,” but based on my experience, I’d bet many are.  And our creative capacity expands by even attempting it. This is the real gold to be mined.

Whether it’s a tossed aside painting, a relationship that’s hit a bump or – for me – the eternal desire to take better care of myself, I’m banking on the creative capacities that lie in committing to recovering fully.  I invite you to join me.

Love,

Cara