Slow Down, Connect, Look Up
Slow Down, Connect, Look Up
Skillful Effort Part 2: Efforting toward a life well-lived
Hi friends!
This second part of my essay on skillful effort. If you didn’t read the first part, no worries. This is a stand-alone expansion set in the same world(s).
Skillful effort means learning to recognize when you’re striving, or too lax, and making adjustments. Because this isn’t necessarily action that could be binary (“do or do not” as Yoda might say), and you get to decide your intentions, recognizing effort is a personal, embodied practice.
We can choose how hard we effort and toward what. Letting our heart drive us, not our fear or greed, is a radical act of reclamation.
I’ve split this essay into four sections:
The effort to plan*
The effort to appreciate*
The effort to engage as oneself with others
The effort to stay open
*Part 1
As shared in part 1, much about the world is presently accelerating at a rate that’s leaving climate scientists “scared as hell.” This offering advocates for us to slow down, connect with others, and bridge mind, body, and world.
“The truth is, we are a nation that normalizes dysfunction. […] it is abnormal to believe that one can have a functional, loving family.” — bell hooks
The People
Childhood is where we learn a lot about the world and how to engage people in it. Consider if you have long-held interpersonal tendencies. Do they still serve you? What efforts can you make to (re)connect with yourself, with others?
In a 60 km radius, there was a handful of staff and eight guests:
Diana, Natalie, and their mom Jennifer;
Monica and her mom, Imelda;
Rajeev and his daughter, Mina;
and me.
Seeing these three parents with their adult children—families at ease—blew my adoptee mind. While not a child, my last vacation was just with me and my adoptive dad. My plan to go to a city he’d like backfired: I would spend my legal birthday alone since “it was [his] vacation, too.” To be fair, he was 1000% more right than the day. Still, parents teach us much about how to treat ourselves and the people around us.
But some of those lessons from long ago may no longer serve.
Stay present
Memories simultaneously prove 1) history impacts the present and 2) the past is not present. Mind meets body meets world.
Lunch and breakfast was served by Jamie, and each family got their own table. My table looked out on my favorite creepy island where a decrepit shack was perfect fodder for folk horror tropes. I brought Cassie Mothwin’s Carved by the Garden, a solo role-playing game wherein players create their own story, and intended to use the island shack as inspiration.
As the sun was setting on the first night, I had my liquid core dice, cards, book of prompts, and journal out. Jamie came over before serving dinner. “No pressure [I immediately felt pressure], but those three ladies have invited you to eat with them.”
Eating family dinner on the first night could set a precedent and change the trip I had in mind. A quick glance. Jennifer gave a friendly nod.
Seeing the cutlery, a memory of being at the faculty center with my dissertation advisor popped to mind. She smacked the fork from my “wrong” hand. “Who raised you?” I always get nervous in settings where I feel my table manners will be judged.
Still, I gathered my things and met them at the juncture of “now” and “this.” This is the effort. Stay present.
As a reward, I learned despite Diana being married with teenage children and Natalie’s career, the women made time to go to a new place every other year or so, just the three of them. They propped each other up in conversation, complimenting each others’ career trajectories and personal growth. They called each other nicknames: “D” and “Nat.”
Peace at family dinner is possible. I was there all three nights.
Giving and receiving care
Imagine shared belief, shared effort, mutual aid. Imagine your boundaries and sticking to them.
At dinner the second night, I learned Natalie liked to play role-playing games. She was familiar with live-action role-playing, Dungeons and Dragons, and was curious about Carved By the Garden. She slowly flipped through Mothwin’s writing prompts before setting the book down.
“So you don’t go on many vacations, you don’t camp, and you’re ‘indoorsy.’
[She’s going to ask why I’m here. Why am I here?]
It’s pretty brave of you to come out here.”
I allowed it to land with a “thanks.” Sometimes it takes effort to abstain from denial and negation. “Oh, you’re just saying that,” or “oh, it’s nothing.” Not saying that is an effort for many, as is really letting it sink in. It was brave. I am brave.
The next day, Maade, our indigenous guide, taught us how to collect spruce sap and turn it into a balm. Spruce sap is one of those substances that can do anything: anti-bacterial, anti-microbial, anti-fungal. Spruce is understood to clean the air, so she had spent much of her 2020 collecting and distributing branches to Dene homes.
When we made the balm, we actually used sap from the previous cohort. Ours would go to the next, in a chain of care and generosity.
Walking to the tipi campfire on our last night, I asked Natalie about the age difference between her and Diana. More than once, the sisters felt enough ease to rest their heads on each other’s shoulders on the couch. (Two was the answer.) Natalie asked if I had any siblings. I also said, “two.” She asked if we got along. I lied and said we spoke on holidays.
Skillful effort means recognizing and working with edges. In my skillful speech post, I said “lying isn’t great.” It’s not. But practice isn’t about perfection, and boundaries are your birthright. I didn’t want to say “12,” so I didn’t. And we still enjoyed our s’mores, the campfire outside AND INSIDE (!) the tipi, and each other.
We were the only eight guests in miles. We ate and spent time together. I observed 3/3 families present with and for each other. Dysfunction is abnormal.
I know it’s possible, because I experienced belonging in the spaces between and at family segregated dining tables.
There is belonging in our bones. It is our nature. We are nature.
The Experience
This world orients us toward win-states and competition, as if outcomes are certain and meritocracies are real. They are not. Effort less. Play more.
For me, this whole trip was a lesson in alchemy. We can transform our shame, isolation, and grief. In this climate, slowing down to be curious can be medicine.
In the first half of this essay, I noted how planning this trip was an exercise assigned to me by my therapist, Nancy.
Around that time, I listened to an audiobook versions of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. In it, the orphaned protagonist Lyra Belacqua grows up under scholastic sanctuary at Jordan College, Oxford. Her unknown parentage makes up a significant aspect of the narrative. While one could say Lyra was never really alone—she was accompanied by her daemon (her soul, her counterpart), Pantalaimon—much of her character development happens through estrangement.
In His Dark Materials, the northern lights represent the thin barrier between the known and the unknown, the physical and metaphysical, and the struggle between open inquiry and dogmatic control. They represent a doorway between worlds that Lyra must navigate.
It took effort from Lyra to become herself, even when she was geographically and emotionally lost, unsure who or what to trust. Out of necessity, she became a masterful tactician with courage and the willingness to re-invent herself, no matter the danger.
I still feel strong resonance with Lyra. I also have amorphous parentage and a daemon: my cat, Fischer. He is a soulmate, a teacher, and one of my life’s greatest loves.
But four years ago, creating my own hero’s journey, writing my own call to adventure, felt impossible. Nancy’s vacation exercise felt fantastical, so I followed Lyra to the North, in search of the consciousness her world called “dust.”
Blachford Lake Lodge is within the arctic circle, 60 kilometers from the closest town, where I would have a 90% chance of seeing the northern lights during a three night stay. I chose them for their sustainability goals and respect for the indigenous tribe they still defer to for land permissions.
As noted a few days before my trip, the forecast was gloomy. There were active wildfires to the southwest, and I was afraid that between the smoke and rainclouds, I’d be spending half a year’s worth of discretionary funds to do things I could have done at home.
Even at dinner the first night, we chatted about the low likelihood of seeing the lights. We went outside and set up cameras, hopeful, but our Aurora tracking apps kept saying it wasn’t going to happen.
I was the only guest who didn’t go to bed. I stayed in the dining room playing Carved by the Garden. My character was an actor preparing for a role, increasingly drawn to the mysteries of the woods. I created scenes involving burning journal pages in my favorite creepy island shack.
Around 11 PM, my app said the aurora might be visible. I went to the late-night guide, Jonathan, to ask. He said, “unfortunately, no.” I returned to my story to murder some hunters (they killed squirrels!).
Some minutes later, Jonathan came back. Actually, yes! There’s a small flow forming.
I sprung into action. I knocked on Monica and Imelda’s door first, then on Natalie’s. Having already heard me knock on the other door, she was standing behind it and scared the crap out of me.
This is what we had come for. Here it was! I did it!
As the lights danced in and out of view, I realized how much of my attention was on capturing this moment instead of living it.
How can one experience nature with a perspective limited by their camera lens? How can one “heal,” when bound to the logic and context of what wounds them? What, exactly, is “wellness” in cultures that refuse to honor the death of a pet, the grief of a relinquished infant, let alone discuss a dying planet?
Because I have no idea, I paused to just be in my body. I’m efforting towards a life well-lived. Living > proof of presence.
I experienced the changing colors, the new rivers of light that came and went. I felt the cold, listened to the water lapping, the ghosts of slain hunters crying in pain (/loon?/howling wolf? We all had guesses, but it was a windmill). The air was clean and mildly scented with spruce, lake water, and—if you really tried, really went that extra mile—hot chocolate.
I stood still, soaking all this water-meets-earth-meets-sky grandeur in, long enough for someone to ask if my camera was broken. Here’s another pic.
The first book of His Dark Materials opens with an excerpt from Paradise Lost that includes imagery of a womb, graves and, twice, the idea of an abyss. We’re in this abyssal cycle of death and birth, destined to keep fighting. Unless! Unless!
“unless the almighty maker them ordain / His dark materials to create more worlds.”
We can imagine and create new ways to be.
There is something much larger, even if shimmering, even if inconstant, than us. And that’s too fucking beautiful, too important, to not slow down to see.
Dine-In or Takeaway Reflections
Really though, what assumptions have you held about connecting with other people? How open are you when meeting new people?
How do you know when you’re enforcing boundaries vs building walls?
What meaningful books, games, vacations have influenced your journey?
Bio
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a writer and mindfulness mentor offering 1:1 sessions and group workshops for those working at the intersections of identity, play, and compassionate engagement. They currently teach at the University of California, Los Angeles and hold an PhD in Performance Studies.
Thanks so much for sharing this beautiful experience with us, Logan. I especially appreciate the reflective questions at the end of this post--so much for all of us to think about here!