Photo Source: Calgary Herald, May 4, 2016

 I have no words today.

No thoughts of what to write, to say.

My heart is heavy. A fire rages out of control and like the thousands fleeing, I am helpless before its onslaught.

I am angry. Angry at the weather that fills the sky with endless blue and hot, dry air. I am angry at no rain on the forecast to squelch the fires burning, just more hot air and even higher winds today. Angry at the fire that feeds itself on its own combustion. Feeds itself on its own energy consuming everything in its path.

People’s homes are lost. Their lives strewn into upheaval. The memories and things they cherished gone up in smoke.

And I can do little to ease the pain, the fear, the sorrow of my neighbours.

Fort McMurray is a small city far to the north. It’s gained some acclaim in recent years as the city that sits in the centrepoint of the dialogue about the oil sands or dirty oil as it’s called by some.

And now it sits empty. 60,000 people evacuated. 60,000 people unsure of their tomorrow in a town they love, the community they build.

On social media, some have written how ‘it serves them right’. Some have suggested the oilsands are to blame. That the energy sector, the sector that accounts for 10% of Canada’s GDP  is at the source of these flames soaring high into the air and wreaking such havoc on the ground. That because of the significant downturn in the Alberta economy caused by the drop in oil prices, and thus a significant downturn in Canada’s economy, the people of Fort McMurray, and Alberta, are getting their due. The chickens have come home to roost, one tweet said.

There are no chickens roosting in Fort McMurray. They have either been scooped up by frantic owners fleeing the flames, or been left behind because the owners could not get home to their roosts to save them. The chickens are helpless in the face of the fire, as are all the wildlife, the livestock, the family pets who could not be saved and the people who are fleeing for their lives.

Fire does not discriminate. It does not give grace.

It burns.

And like the words of those who feel this is their time to stand on pulpits and chastise and berate those whose lives are being torn apart by nature’s untameable wrath, fire leaves scars.

As one tweeter said in response to a particularly nasty tweet about the people of Fort Mac ‘getting their due’; this is not about politics, environmental diatribe or anything else. This is about humans.

I stand with my neighbours in Fort McMurray today. I stand in solidarity with their need for safety, support, understanding, help.

The fires still rage. They still burn out of control. Today promises no relief. Only worse.

I am angry. Please, go away blue skies. Let the rains come down.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/wildfire-rages-in-fort-mcmurray-as-evacuees-settle-in-edmonton-1.3565573

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/fort+mcmurray+wildfire+pushed+back+even+temperatures+climb/11893489/story.html

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/27all+sudden+dark+fort+mcmurray+residents+share+experiences/11894484/story.html

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My beloved returned from a week at Super Choices recently, excited, full of energy, on fire.

It was exciting to feel and share in his passion, his thoughts and excitement about the possibilities for his life and our future.

It could have been different.

My expectations could have lead me down the road to resentment and been the trigger that turned me off from being present to all the possibility his excitement represents.

Because… The thing is, I had been suggesting that he go for years. Every time I mentioned it though he would reply with something like, “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know if that’s what I want. I’ll see about it.” And then, he has dinner with a friend he really respects and this guy suggests it and C.C. comes home and tells me he’s going.

Bam! Just like that. Expectations laid bare and resentment raises its ugly head.

And here’s what could have happened.

In having asked him about going for so long, and getting the response of “I don’t know…” resentment could have grown. My critter-mind could have gotten busy telling me that he should have said yes to me! I’m the one who’s been asking. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Harrumph.

How come some dude who hasn’t known him anywhere near as long as I have and hasn’t been suggesting it for as long as I have and doesn’t know what he needs as well as I do, suggests it at dinner and Bam! Suddenly it’s a good idea?

Like Anne Lamott, Joe Davis, one of the facilitators at Choices knows a thing or two about expectations. He says, “Expectations are premeditated resentments.”

Fact is, I wanted C.C. to go for me.

Fact is, he can’t go for me. He can’t even go for the friend who mentioned it at dinner. He can only go for himself. And that’s what he did.

Now, here’s the thing. My expectation and its companion resentment are all about me. All about what I want for me.  Sure, in this case I wanted him to go because I was excited about how it could impact his life and our relationship. And, as long as I don’t attach any expectations on his experience and what he might feel, get, achieve, do, etc., my excitement for his going remains a noble desire for what we both have stated we want in our relationship; growth and possibility, intimacy and closeness…

However, attaching expectations changes everything from being a shared ‘noble desire’ to an ignoble resentment within me.

My expectations are made of my desire for him to go because I had ideas on what the outcome should be when he went.

My expectations are made of my vision for what he would experience, how he would be impacted, how he would respond.

And none of those expectations have anything to do with him. They have everything to do with me.

Because ultimately, if I stuck with wanting him to go because I asked him and feeling dischuffed because it was a friend’s voice he ‘listened to’ and not mine, I would be acting out from a place of feeling invisible, not good enough, not important enough for him to do it for me.

Consciously, I know I am good enough. I am worthy. I am visible and I matter to him.

But in the crazy-making land of the critter-mind, none of that matters. Critter-mind only wants me to hear how insignificant I am, and how it’s all the other person’s fault I feel the way I do. If they had just done what I asked, wanted, needed to feel like I was visible and cherished and important enough to listen to, I wouldn’t feel the way I do.

The land of the critter-mind is crazy-making.

Which is why it’s so important to not hold expectations of what another will experience. We do not and cannot control how they will respond, how they will react. We can only hold space to share in their responses, reactions, experience in a loving, accepting and caring way.

Critter-mind will always tell us it is ‘all about me’. It will always want us to try to control everything and everyone around us by expecting them to do what we want, when we want, how we want — so that we don’t feel afraid, less than, not good enough….

Fortunately, not giving into expectations of how another will respond or experience, leaves room for each of us to be accountable for our own journey. It also leaves space for the other to be accountable for theirs.

In that space, possibility expands, intimacy grows and hearts open up to the beauty and wonder of all that we are when we let go of our expectations of how everyone and everything should be.

In that space, the embers of expectations cannot find the air to flame up into a full blown firestorm of resentment. In that space, acceptance, gratitude and love create a sea of possibility for each of us to be the best expression of ourselves without fearing the other’s expectations of how we should be expressing ourselves and our experiences.

Namaste.

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This blog post originally appeared on the Choices Seminar Website Blog, Sunday, April 24th, 2016.

To the rest of the world it was dubbed, “The Summer of Love”. There was no social media outpouring, no Instagram shots memorializing the events, no tweets, no blogs advertising the date and time. There was just a movement. A groundswell of information passed mouth to mouth. Bringing people together. Young people mostly. 75,000 of them congregating in a few blocks area of San Francisco. Haight Ashbury where they would set in motion a revolution of the psychedelic kind that would set love free on raised consciousness and stranger sex.

Across the continent and over the ocean, I was oblivious to the Summer of Love. I had Paris. My Summer of Paris.

And I was cool. Not for me long velvet dresses paired with lace up boots dancing with spiffed up young men dressed in riding coats and top hats.

I had my hip-hugger, turquoise bell-bottom pants and my white poor-boy sweater. I had my twill quadrilles and my white patent leather purse. I had my sitting at a sidewalk cafe looking bored, like I fit in, like I was waiting to be discovered caffe lattes made with hot chocolate because, well, I was only 13 and 13 year olds did not drink coffee in the summer of 1967.

Life was calling my name. I could feel it. Sense it. I hungered for it. Yearned for it that Summer of Paris. I was 13 going on… 13. I knew nothing about being a woman. I was awash in a sea of knowinglessness and I was hungry. I wanted to know. Everything. Especially about sex. Same sex. Opposite sex. Going down sex. Going anywhere sex, maybe even the moon. I wanted to know it all but didn’t have the language, didn’t know the words to even phrase the questions to ask. And good girls didn’t ask anyway so I stayed silent.

I was an island of nothing other than my hip-hugger, turquoise bell bottom pants and white poor-boy sweater that I’d purchased in a tiny boutique somewhere near the Avenue des Champs-Élysées where every day my sister and I spent hours trolling the streets soaking in everything French.

And American too.

Like youth the world over, we gravitated to the familiar, the known, ‘our own’. And American boys were hot that Summer of Paris. Even if all we ever did was give them directions when they were lost, or pretend to be lost when we wanted to meet some cute young American boy selling the International Herald Tribune outside the entrance to the Gard du Nord on Avenue la Fayette where we would catch the Métro just to see him.

We were in love with all things ‘l’Americaine that summer of Paris. Especially the boys.

They were all blond and blue-eyed and fresh cut and seemingly pure in their white cotton striped shirts with the button down collars and cuffs rolled up to reveal the soft downy blond hair of their arms.

They had perfect smiles. And perfect accents and we wanted to be perfect for them.

Alas, we weren’t French and so we were relegated to giving them directions to the Tour Eiffel or perhaps le Louvre. Though I do have a dim recollection of my sister scoring a date with some young boy. I remember vaguely disappearing on my own near Sacre Coeur as she sat and sipped her Chocolate Chaud and listened earnestly while some blond haired Adonis made her laugh where they sat together, her dark haired head bent close towards his blond. I don’t think their hands even touched, or that they even kissed.

And I was so disappointed. She was my older sister. She was supposed to teach me the ways of being a real woman.

It was not to be.

The ways of being a real woman would not reveal themselves until many decades later.

After I rid myself of the notion that hip-hugger, turquoise bell bottoms and a white poor-boy sweater would buy me entrance to a world where to fit in I just had to be like everyone else.

After I quit playing lost just to get directions from a blue-eyed blond-haired boy who spoke not a word of French and did not know his way around Paris let alone the world.

Why I thought blue-eyed boys or tall dark strangers held the secret to my being a real woman is the stuff of history. The stuff of a patriarchal system where women had no voice. Where women had no thoughts worth hearing. Where women only belonged when they stood silently beside their man and smiled. Convincingly. Like they were everything they ever dreamt of being because they had ‘their man’ and their man was the only god they ever needed to know because their man was better than her man, that one over there who smiles just as convincingly but who also holds that vacant, frightened, empty look in her eyes that says silently, because no one was listening anyway, “Is this all there is?”

Hell no!

But it would take many broken dreams and shattered ideals to discover, the only way to be a real woman was to give up the idea, that to belong, I just needed to wear a size 8 or 6 or 4 or 2 or any size of turquoise hip-hugger bell bottom pants.

I don’t have to wear anything to make me fit in because I know, I am a real woman when I fearlessly speak my truth without tampering it down to fit into someone else’s.

I am a real woman when I quit pretending I am lost in a world of confusion.

I am a real woman when I fit in to being me.

My computer has decided to have a sluggish start to the week. I think it’s objecting to my dependency on it.

See you tomorrow.

Years ago, when I was a rookie stockbroker working for a big name brokerage house, a senior VP offered to ease my way into ‘the big times’, if…

The ‘if’ was the catch. It involved sexual favours and the threat that if I told anyone, no one would believe me. He was a senior partner. I was a rookie. No contest.

I believed him so, rather than submit to his sexual advances, I did the only thing I thought I could do at the time. I said nothing and moved to another firm.

Several years later, after leaving the brokerage industry, I worked for a Canadian hi-tech start-up with offices in Silicon Valley. I was situated here. Most of the team I worked with was in California. Everyday I’d have a conference call with one of the VPs in the California office, and every call, he’d make some type of sexual innuendo over the phone.

I thought the best way to handle it was to laugh it off. To pretend I didn’t hear, or didn’t get his meaning.

That worked, until we were alone in a hotel elevator while attending a conference in Dallas. His floor was before mine. The doors opened for him to exit, he turned to me and asked if I was joining him in his room. I laughed it off. Pretended like I just thought he was being funny.

The next day, he began to make my life hell. There was nothing I could do that was right. Nothing my department created that met his needs for sales and marketing support.

My boss asked me what was going on. I feigned confusion. I told him I didn’t know. I suggested it was perhaps a mis-communication.

And then the guy in California got really nasty. I couldn’t ignore it so I went to my boss and told him the truth.

The solution. They reorganized our work so that I did not have to work directly with the man in California. He was too valuable to lose. To critical to our agenda to let go.

I said nothing. Got pregnant soon thereafter and left the company.

I felt responsible, culpable, accountable for what happened. And, for my actions, I was. Except, I thought it was all my responsibility. That their bad behaviour was my fault. That if I had just… (pick your poison) … THEY wouldn’t have felt they could make such advances.

Truth is, what I am most responsible for is my silence.

Truth is, millions of women continue to encounter such treatment today. It’s not because we deserve it, or ask for it, or ‘know’ we want it. It’s because sexual politics continue to play a role in our society, and we stay silent.

Last night at dinner with my eldest daughter, she talked about power and control and how if women do not know they have choices, or understand their power, or believe the stakes are too high to challenge the status quo, they cannot be held accountable for their actions.

For me, having walked away in silence, I disagree.

At the time, I thought I had no choice even though I had lots of choices — I just chose to take the one that I thought ‘hurt’ the least.

Truth is, I was scared to rock the boat. I was afraid to take on the male establishment, to challenge the ‘acceptable’, to poke the bear of sexual power and confront the underbelly of sexual power.

Truth is, I was afraid to speak up.

I can rationalize my fear away by saying it was too hard. I would have been pilloried by the men. I would have been ridiculed, mocked, black-listed, shunned.

It doesn’t matter.

Truth is, I stayed silent in the face of abuse.

If we want to change the world, if we want to stop abuse, end violence, end sexual predation, then we must not let fear drive us into hiding.

We must let courage draw us into giving voice — and stop being afraid of the consequences.

And we must stop saying, I didn’t know any better.

I knew better when I walked away in shame. I knew better when I didn’t speak up. It’s just, I was afraid of the consequences. Afraid of what might happen.

Sure, it’s not fair that women have to rise up to claim their voice and create equality. I mean really, why can’t men just do it for us?

And that’s the thing. Men can’t do it for us.

We must do it for us.

It is our right.

It is our duty.

It is our obligation.

If I could go back and change anything in those two encounters, it would be that I did not silence my voice. It would be that I recognized the moment in time where I had the opportunity to make a difference, not just for myself, but for women, and men, today.

‘Cause here’s the thing. What happened to me happens to millions of women everyday. And for the majority, we are still saying silent.

It’s time to stop the silence and roar.