Leaning In and Letting Go
Posted on October 29, 2021
This past year has been an exercise in leaning in and letting go. My reflex to help and solve and fix has left me burned out with nothing left to give. My vision of the future has dimmed.
Working with a small group to tackle a large challenge is inherently exhausting. A single leader will usually emerge, which will often lead to conflict — the most tenured member believes they should have the loudest voice; the member with the most relevant title believes they have the most accurate perspective. Tension rises, morale goes down, work stagnates, nobody wins.
I used to bring this home with me every night — the frustration of what little power I had in the face of all that could be done better weighed heavily on my heart. I resented that the personal agendas of other, more powerful colleagues outweighed and overruled progress and necessary transformation.
Funny how this is a recurring theme even on a larger scale in American society and politics. It truly is turtles all the way down.
Anyway, something had to give. This was not a sustainable cycle for me.
Donna Haraway, whom I’m sure many of my other classmates will borrow from, says that “staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present…” [1]. While I couldn’t escape the persistent trouble of my work environment, I could change my emotional relationship with it.
The first step in making kin with the nature of my job, much like a living being, was acknowledging that I couldn’t change it. I needed to stop trying to take such preventative measures against the inevitable dissonance between what is needed and what is done — it would happen anyway, and I would be the only emotional casualty.
Instead I turned to my real kin, the people I work with every day. Fostering deeper latitudinal relationships built a collective strength to continue working on what we believed that couldn’t collapse under the weight of another disappointment. The collective adapts and reorients to the new path, bringing with it the same desire for positive change. In real-world words, my team and I have continued to focus and build the necessary changes we wanted to see in our project despite clashes and redirections between those in leadership with positive results.
My beloved colleagues
Now, I reflect on Donella Meadows’ parting words in her 2009 book Thinking in Systems — “We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them! [2]”
I don’t know what will happen as I continue to stay with the trouble and dance with the uncertainty, but I know that the fire in my soul and the light in my future have begun to flicker once again.
[1] Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
[2] Meadows, Donella H. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Edited by Diana Wright, Earthscan, 2009.