The wind was robbed from my sails.<\/p>\n
This week leaves me feeling like a cautionary example from Steven D\u2019Souza and Diana Renner\u2019s work. A twisted mess of dashed hopes, overconfidence, and an undistinguished identity. A six month journey with positive signs all the way quickly shattered by a single, rote e-mail notification of \u201canother candidate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Groping in the dark, I print off images of the grief cycle, see the word \u201cnew\u201d with \u201cnew plans\u201d and \u201cnew hopes\u201d and a falteringly spark of hope. But it quickly fizzles.<\/p>\n
I hesitantly trust the semester\u2019s reading plan as a sovereign guide. Baptized in a moment into a season of Not Knowing<\/i> and Not Doing\u2026<\/i>I thought I knew more than the occasion revealed. D\u2019Souza and Renner pen, \u201cRealistic confidence doesn\u2019t get us in trouble, but its bedfellow, overconfidence, does. Overconfidence is a bias where we inaccurately perceive and assess our judgement and abilities as being overly positive\u201d (39, Not Knowing<\/i>).<\/p>\n
The rest of the readings provide the way on. I am forced to trust God is making me more Anti-fragile – <\/i>I will bounce back, by his grace. I will somehow grow better through this discipline. I also long to be a leader embodying a non-anxious presence, <\/i>living without a Failure of Nerve. <\/i>Self-differentiated from others and my work. \u201cIf we cannot distinguish ourselves from the role we hold, we are likely to place too much emphasis on our work at the expense of who we are outside of the role, investing too much of our sense of self-worth in it. This is dangerous if we suddenly lose our job\u201d (75, Not Doing<\/i>). And finally, I limp in my story as the Hero with a Thousand <\/i>(and one) Faces, <\/i>stepping over the threshold into the truly unknown with battles, and loss and love still ahead. In that moment yesterday, these books became not just texts, but maps.<\/p>\n
\n
\u201cThe wind was robbed from my sails\u201d is an interesting sentence. It hints of blaming (step 2 of the grief cycle), but the use of passive voice indicates we don\u2019t know who performed that action – who robbed the wind? While I have had images of those to target, I hear a faint whisper, \u201cDon\u2019t go down that path.\u201d I get the fuzzy image perhaps this isn\u2019t the wind robbed form my sails, but me laboring in the belly of ship. Oaring and padding, oaring and paddling, until Someone breaks my oar and gently points out the sails above.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Steven D\u2019Souza and Diana Renner, Not Doing: The Art of Effortless Action <\/i>(New York: LID Publishing, 2018).<\/p>\n
Steven D\u2019Souza and Diana Renner, Not Knowing: The Art of Turning Uncertainty into Opportunity <\/i>(New York: LID Publishing, 2016).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The wind was robbed from my sails. This week leaves me feeling like a cautionary example from Steven D\u2019Souza and Diana Renner\u2019s work. A twisted mess of dashed hopes, overconfidence, and an undistinguished identity. A six month journey with positive signs all the way quickly shattered by a single, rote e-mail notification of \u201canother candidate.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":131,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1866],"class_list":["post-26729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-renner-and-dsouza","cohort-lgp10"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/131"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26729"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26730,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26729\/revisions\/26730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}