care – Embody Peacebuilding

On Efficiency, Intentionality, and Care

In recent weeks, I’ve found myself in recurrent conversation and reflection about time, pacing, relationality, and flow. These threads have been weaving in reflexive navigation of collaborations and convenings alongside colleagues, friends, organizations, and processes. In these different spaces of encounter and exchange, I have noticed moments of profound resonance as well as deep dissonance that seem somehow tethered to time:

Moments when time feels like a soft companion, and others where time feels like a burden, a foe, or both.
Moments when process seems to circle and circle, conversations belabored and heavy as collectives strive for clarity yet only feel to deepen into complexity.
Moments when time boundaries have been breached – extending beyond a committed end point, sometimes by a little, sometimes by far more than feels honoring to the people and to the process.
Moments when collaboration flows nearly seamlessly, where time feels to suspend as conversation becomes a container for craft and creation.

Across these experiences, among many others, the center point of polarity presents as time. Yet, time is not itself the issue. Time is relative – our relationship to it shaped significantly by culture and context.

The deeper invitation these experiences may hold is toward an attentiveness to pacing, which I understand to be our relationship to movement with and through time. In conversation with a dear friend about the processes of one community with which I am involved, he gave voice to a couplet to which I’ve been consistently returning: pace of care and pace of purpose.

Pace of care suggests moving in a way that attends to relationship. It holds the spaciousness to give voice and listen deeply to individual and collective needs, to name experiences of challenge, to process through conflictual dynamics, to celebrate and dignify one another.

Pace of purpose suggests moving in a way that attends to vision. It holds the encouragement to move with generative momentum in the process of creation, to be accountable to commitments, to hold the flexibility to follow emergence while remaining anchored in intention.

How do we move both at the pace of care and at the purpose?

Holding these pacings not as distinct tides, but rather mutually constitutive flows that humanize and give dignity to process, the inquiry might be reframed: How do we move at the pace of intention?

Inhabiting this inquiry has opened a curiosity around notions of efficiency. When this word initially emerged in my reflections, I noticed a resistance. I am wary of how pernicious capitalist impulses of productivity and urgency so powerfully shape relationships to time for so many of us. How efficiency is frequently framed in service of minimizing cost and maximizing profit, too often at the expense of people and the more than human world.

Holding this resistance, my curiosity persisted, curling around contesting embodied experiences: The ease and flow when creative and collaborative processes moved efficiently, and the heaviness and burden when such processes moved at a pace that felt neither caring nor purposeful. The contrast of these experiences illuminated the synergy that expresses itself in the presence of alignment. This felt sense of flow was expressed when there was an alignment of values, purpose, and process, and enhanced when these dimensions were clearly named for collective visibility and accountability.

It is of note that this frame of efficiency does not correlate to speed or even a singular pace. There will be times where we move fast, where we move slow, and even when we pause, because that is what is needed and generative in the moment. This approach to efficiency thus has less to do with a calculus of time, and much more to do with the practices that enable us to move individually and collectively at the pace of intention.

Efficiency (n.): A quality of pacing in creative and collaborative endeavors emergent from remaining in integrity with intention, made possible through alignment of values, purpose, and process.

I am noticing, learning from, and seeking to embody various individual and relational practices to nurture the capacity to move with efficiency at the pace of intention. Here is an incomplete and growing list of such practices that I share with humility and curiosity about what your practices may be:

Ensure collective visibility and consent to the intention of a given conversation or process.
Be intentional about the process through which a conversation or collaboration unfolds. For example, ask the questions: How do we want to have this conversation? How do we want to approach this piece of work? What is the sequence of steps or inquiries that best enables us to fulfill our intention?
Cultivate the capacity to notice and name when a process or conversation is deviating from purpose. In this naming, center choice: Is this a deviation from original purpose that feels generative and important, or is it something that can be held for future conversation?
Acknowledge when creative process or conversation feels cumbersome. If there is spaciousness to do so, pause so as not force process. Trust that the time will come where creativity and creation will flow effortlessly. (This practice must be held in relationship with the reality of timelines and delivery dates, which sometimes impel engagement despite unideal conditions.)
Attend to relationships with authenticity and care, always and all ways.

On Care: In Resistance and Refinement

To practice into care is to practice into paradox. Even as this practice embodies a remembrance of our inherent interconnection, so too does it elicit a confrontation with our edges. And in these murky spaces between connection and boundary, I find myself wading in inquiry. The questions are many, however two are feeling particularly sticky for me this week:

How do we navigate encounters with resistance to care we may extend?

How do we grapple with the ways in which our care is imperfect?

These questions feel alive as I reflect on my experiences of both receiving and giving care in contexts that were anything but clear. I am writing this piece not for clarity on answers, but rather to better understand the contours of questions we will inevitably encounter in our relational lives.

As a teenager and into my early twenties, I experienced multiple hospitalizations and endured various forms of intensive treatment for an eating disorder. At different times I experienced a constellation of hospital stays, weekly health clinic visits, intensive outpatient programs, a residential program, and regular sessions with multiple therapists. The intensity varied, however for several years, some level of treatment formed a constant in my life. There were times in which I acknowledged the need for these interventions. I could understand the risk to my health and the risk to my life that my eating disorder created (even if at times I felt ambiguous about the consequences of these risks). There were also times – when the eating disorder was strongest and thus when the level of treatment was highest – that I resisted the care that my parents and health providers were imposing.

In these moments, what I felt was anything but care. What I felt was an attack on my agency. Their perception was that my voice and choices were distorted by the eating disorder. In return, I felt that whatever I would express in terms of my physical or emotional needs was dismissed – at times partially and at times fully.

The severity of this experience varied according to the type of treatment I was receiving. I am deeply grateful to have worked with amazing therapists, a brilliant nutritionist, and to have had (and continue to receive) invaluable compassionate accompaniment from my mother. In contrast, I also experienced treatment protocols whereby I felt completely silenced – perceived and treated as a broken, self-destructive object that needed fixing.

In these extensions of care, which ranged from fierce compassion to dictatorial, there were many times I struggled and resisted. In this resistance, there was a significant difference in how I felt care and pushed through the resistance my eating disorder put forward. This difference was the felt sense of love, compassion, and humanization in how care was extended.

There were moments my resistance was met with harshness and berating. My attempts to express the raging discomfort I felt in my body were discounted. My emotional experience, my agency, my personhood – all disregarded. This led to fights, fractured relationships, sometimes even attempts to run away.

There were moments where my resistance was met with patience and compassion, a recognition of the challenges I was experiencing and a holding firm to what would support my recovery. I felt seen and held, and often the conversations that unfolded from these instances bolstered the relational fabric of care and supported the progress of my recovery. In these moments, I truly felt care, even as I was pushed beyond what felt comfortable. In fact, it was this quality of care that enabled me to do so and thus enabled my recovery.

Part of my recovery journey has entailed a recognition for the ways in which my individual experience of an eating disorder is an expression of family, cultural, and structural dynamics of hurt, harm, and injustice. Carrying this lens, scaling from the individual and relational levels to the systemic, I am brought to a recognition that in the work of justice and liberation, there will be times in which our extension of care will not be perceived or received as such. Our work toward assuring collective wellbeing – which entails a confrontation with powerful and destructive individual and collective patterns, shaping, and systems that prevail in the world we live in – will be met with resistance. There are many ways in which we can meet this resistance in the name of building a more just and dignified world. Without any of these invalidating different strategies, I find myself wondering:

How can we notice when our extensions of care diminish or uplift the humanity of those we are caring for?
What possibilities for transformation unfold if we meet resistance with fierce compassion?
How do we nurture the patience and build the resource to accompany and create the conditions for resistance to transform over the long term?

During the first six months of the COVID pandemic, I moved to Paris to accompany my grandmother through the French confinements. A remarkably strong woman, up to that point she was living in her apartment alone. However, as a 99-year-old, who turned 100 one month into the pandemic, it was clear she needed additional support through the strict confinements that characterized the early COVID response in France.

In my mid-twenties at the time, I had no previous experience as a live in carer for someone in old age. But more than a carer, I was a grand-daughter who wanted to do her best to ensure the safety and wellbeing of her grandmother, to take care of her as best I could.

My grandmother was often in significant discomfort and pain. In an effort to ease her discomfort and to attend well to her needs, I took over many of the (by then diminished) tasks she would have previously done. Much of this was to do with meals. I would prepare her food, set the table, serve her, cleat the table, and do the dishes – all tasks she would have done before.

I thought this was helpful until one day she reflected something to the effect of, “Before you came, I knew where things were in the kitchen, and now I don’t remember. I used to be able to do certain things, and I can’t anymore.”

With all my good intentions to do as much as I could to care for my beloved grandmother, I ultimately diminished her agency. There are times I question the extent of the repercussions of this, how this might have contributed in certain ways to her decline. For when we cease to practice certain actions, we lose our capacity to do them. And for such an elderly person, this loss is permanent.

I wish I would have known better. Rather than do so many things for her, I wish I would have accompanied her with greater attention to providing assistance while creating conditions for her to continue moving and doing as she would have before. There were times we did this well. For example, we would prepare vegetables together to be cooked, or I would set pots and pans in place for her to be able to cook simple things without needing to lift and move objects that were heavy for her. There were many other times I defaulted to doing too much, motivated simultaneously by a desire to care fully for someone I love as well as a strong inherited tendency toward control.

It has been over two years since my grandmother passed away. I remain ever grateful for the many wonderful moments we shared during the time we lived together in the final years of her life – playing Scrabble, listening to her stories, sharing songs we loved, going for outings along the Seine (once the confinement restrictions eased). I also often experience doubt and regret for the ways in which my care was imperfect.

From this experience, I am trying learn and grow my care practice – not to strive for a perfect care, but to care in more helpful ways. Again, I wonder…

How can we extend care in a way that uplifts the agency and dignity of those for whom we are caring? For our care not to be of a quality of doing for, but of accompaniment?
How can we presence the patterns and shaping that contribute to the ways in which we care, some of which may be motivated by love and others that may be motivated by fear and control?
How can we approach and embody care with transparent reciprocity – to clarify needs of individuals and in relationship, and to revisit these needs for if and when they evolve?

Placing these two stories alongside one another, I am struck by the parallels. In the same way I received care through control in my mid-teens, years later, I replicated this pattern. This is a simplifying observation, as there were many counter-examples both to the care I received from my parents and to the care I extended to my grandmother. Regardless, the parallel is striking, and invites a deeper reflection into how the ways we practice care in the present are shaped by our previous experiences both giving and receiving care.

If we seek to co-create cultures of care in our relationships, our communities, or organizations, and ultimately our world, must be willing to grapple with the complexities and paradoxes that shape how we experience care individually and across scales of relationship. My wish and my hope is that this grappling can be done with curiosity and compassion; in service of deeper understanding of self, others, and the systems we inhabit; and in the company of caring community to accompany our growth and healing.

The inquiries and reflections in this piece are elicited by and drawn from my participation in the RISE for Relational Facilitators training from the Courage of Care Coalition. I extend deep thanks to Brooke D. Lavelle and Maha El-Sheikh for crafting and holding this beautiful space, and to my fellow training participants for their reflections and contributions to co-creating the experience.

On Care and Dignity

I am in the early days of learning how to move and be differently in my body.

I took a fall while rock climbing this week. Dropping to the earth from fifteen feet up a wall, my body tried to protect itself. I landed on my outstretched arm and dislocated my elbow.

I remember being on the wall. I remember being on the ground. I don’t remember the moments in between.

I am learning how to move with three limbs.

There are many things I can do with my body. There are many things I can’t anymore, at least not alone.

I am learning how to receive care and assistance in new ways. At the same time, I am present to my desire to find new ways to do physical tasks independently. Things like opening a jar or cutting a piece of fruit. I notice my resistance to offers to do tasks for me, particularly the tasks I can still do. My independence and agency are cherished, even as the reality of our interdependence is in a particularly strong expression these days.

I keep remembering my grandmother. I wish I could apologize. Sometimes we learn too late.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, I moved to Paris to accompany my then 99-year-old grandmother through the weeks and months of confinement. I’d never been a sole and full time caregiver for an elder before. In my deepest desire to help her, to relieve her of any burden of excessive effort, I began doing nearly every task for her. I thought I was helping. Instead, I overtook the daily routines and tasks that she still had the capacity to do.

Only now, as I move slowly, finding new ways to accomplish what were previously simple tasks, am I able to experience an embodied compassion for what my grandmother was trying to communicate to me.

Perhaps when we offer or express care, it is not always best to ‘care for.’ We may be wiser to ‘care with’ – to acknowledge the agency and capacity of each person in the caring relationship, both those offering and those receiving care. In this way, to extend care is not to do something for someone. Instead, to care with is to accompany another, offering assistance if and when an endeavor exceeds their limitations in a given moment. Such an embodiment of care allows for a fuller acknowledgement of reciprocity in relationship. I may extend care in a certain expression, and receive care in another. Further, whereas I may currently be in a position of being largely receiving of care, and in the future, I will be able to offer care in return.

Our independence does not negate our interdependence. Just as our interdependence does not negate our independence. These are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps, rather they are mutually constitutive.

It is in the claiming of my own agency that I am able to be present and in service to others.

It is in the recognition of the connection of my life with that of all beings that I am not only called into service, but also supported and sustained through community care, accountability, and nourishment.

There is great power in both agency and compassionate relationship. May we embody the bridge that joins these expressions of humanity, in doing so, honoring the dignity of ourselves and each other.