"How are you orienting?"

Something a little more personal, and a bonus

Several years ago I started working with a phenomenal mind-body practitioner to help me with what I initially thought was primarily a concern about my heart rate variability being low. Low HRV is a risk factor for a bunch of other things, and mine was… really low. I was under a lot of stress on multiple fronts, I was working all of the time, and as a consequence, my nervous system was stuck in fight-or-flight mode essentially all of the time.

It is a good thing I started working with him, because about 18 months ago, the wheels came off of my life. In addition to the concerns about the state and direction of the world that I think most of us share, and the concerns about a second Trump Administration, I also managed to stack a fairly major set of personal health issues, a company bankruptcy, a personal bankruptcy driven by the company bankruptcy, a divorce, and an extended period of unemployment on top of that. Zero stars out of five, do not recommend.

And yet.

At our sessions each week, he would ask me, “How are you orienting?” What he meant was: I can’t necessarily control the situation I’m in or the presence of all of these external stressors, but I do get to control what I focus on, how I interpret it, and who I want to be in the moment. I choose whether I stop to enjoy the greenness of the cedar tree in my yard, the sweetness of a fresh apple, the twinkle in my son’s eye as he tells me a joke. I choose whether to visualize and work towards the future I want, or whether to focus my energy and my attention on my disappointment or frustration or anger.

The ability to choose where to focus our attention is incredibly powerful. It’s not about ignoring reality or taking a simplistic view of a complex world; it’s about deciding, in this one life we each get, who we want to be and become and how we want to spend the minutes and hours and days we are given, however many there are.

And so, in the early days of this interregnum, while I was still partially bedridden and so much felt out of my control, I wrote the book that I’ve been meaning to write for the last fourteen years or so. I’ll be honest: I wasn’t sure I could write a book. For me, mostly, writing is hard and somewhat exhausting, even when at the end I’m happy with what I’ve written. But I’d given a keynote at Netroots Nation in 2012 right before Elizabeth Warren and Mazie Hirono, and I’d laid out a taxonomy of power that I thought might be useful, and I’d wanted to flesh it out more and get it out into the world to help people.

So I chose how to orient, and I wrote. And then I edited. And then I threw that away and tried again. For most of the chapters, I wrote and rewrote and revised them between seven and a dozen times, and I’m still not completely satisfied. But I got it down, and I sent out notes to some literary agents to see if one would want to represent me, and I got some kind and helpful responses from several agents and a yes from the person I signed a contract with.

The book is at a stage which in publishing is described as “out on submission” where the proposal and a sample chapter or two have been sent to publishing houses, and they are deciding whether they are interested in publishing it. Three publishing houses have expressed significant interest; several more have declined but said nice things; a few have declined and said less-nice things. It’s all a part of the process, so it’s all good.

A few weeks ago I went to Netroots Nation, the conference where I’d introduced the ideas, and I did a training on the framework. For folks who attended, I had a 56-page document they could take home, a condensed, distilled version of the taxonomy and levers of power. I’ve gotten some feedback that it’s useful, and I promised to post it here in the Substack, so here it is.

A taxonomy of power

I don’t think, in the absence of the cascade of crises in my life, I would have taken the time and focus to write the book, or to distill the taxonomy in quite this way. So to the question of how I’m orienting: I wouldn’t say this has been a blessing, but it has been an opportunity to reorient, to do something outside of my comfort zone that I might not otherwise have done.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world
the master calls a butterfly.

Richard Bach