Tag Archives: introvert

Mama, Pause.

Posted on by under Alone in Place

“Go where they can’t find you,” she charged, and I fled to the cover of pine forest. Head down, heart pounding, I parted from the others and passed groups of children–the buzz of their giggling mixing with the light rain. I looked up briefly to scan faces. My own girls were not present, thank God. That would have been the end of this experiment in solitude. “Mama!” they would call. “Mama!!” more insistent if I did not answer the first time. “Mama!!!!” and I would once again be swept up into my routines of responding, all the constant demands, the pressure, the noise.

10415878565_3e40478198_oTwenty minutes. I just needed twenty minutes away.

I scanned the edges of the path and saw a row of faded red cabins stationed along the tree line. Here? Or should I keep going? These were unfamiliar woods and I didn’t know where everyone else was headed. But what if there were people staying in these cabins? No, they looked empty, alone like I longed to be. I just needed to decide quickly–already I could hear the crunch of gravel, moving in my direction. Just decide. Decide.

Slipping off the path, I  jogged to the backside of a particularly abandoned-looking structure and crouched on the porch behind a low wall. Voices swept down the path I had just left, and I wondered if someone would make a turn for the woods and see me there, hiding. I pressed myself into the corner, back against the wall, and felt dampness seep through my jeans. Darnit. I was sitting in wet pine needles, but there was nowhere else to go. I closed my eyes, wishing them all away.

* * * * *

We were in the woods for a church retreat, the first retreat my small urban church has taken in the ten years I’ve been there. I was surprised by how many people signed up–when retreats had been proposed in the past they were quickly shot down with protests:

Nuh huh, I do not do spiders.

Do you really want to get eaten by some bear?

And my personal favorite:

Don’t you know there are crazy people in those woods? And no one, I mean No One, will even hear you scream.

But by some miracle there were seventy of us gathered for this weekend away. Granted, the hotel-like lodge and cottages represented the near-opposite of roughing it. The buildings were clean and new with sparkling bathrooms and spacious common areas.

The problem (for me) was that they were also full of people, and because the dorms were single-sex, I had the girls on my own. On the drive to camp, I had tried to explain my unease to my husband.

“I don’t want to do this,” I said, and he looked at me, confused. “Do what?” I stared hard at the highway, groping for the right words. “People,” I tried, “I can’t take this many people right now. Meals in the dining hall. Sleeping in dorms. Large group gatherings. Small group discussions. I, I… I just don’t want to be here. I’m not sure I can do this.”

It was mid-May, and the month had been full of marathons, figurative and literal. The school year was almost over, and every moment away from the kids was filled with summer preparations and other responsibilities. I was on overload–a lot had taken place, but I hadn’t had time to process it all. This combination is difficult for anyone, but murder for an introvert like me.

It’s like this: imagine my introverted brain as a water pipe building up internal layers of calcification. Any kind of stimulus–people, events, emotions–are the calcium deposits. As long as I have time to deal with them as they come–silence, journaling, walking, prayer–they don’t build up. But if I don’t, if they just keep coming, then the pipe gets clogged.

And when the pipe gets clogged I can’t think anymore. Or make good decisions. Or live with seventy other people and my kids in dorms, and discuss God or church or each other’s lives or whatever it was we were going to talk about all weekend.

However.

When you’re driving to camp with a trunk packed full of sleeping bags and two excited children jabbering away in the back seat, what you think you can do is no longer terribly relevant.

* * * * *

When our speaker introduced the weekend’s theme I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. “This weekend,” she said, “we are going to talk about solitude.”

Pulling out a book by one of my favorite writers, Henri Nouwen, she defined solitude as being alone with God and hearing that you are loved. If we didn’t take this time, she warned, we would try to find affirmation in the shifting sands of human relationships. If we didn’t begin with solitude, we could never find authentic community because we would always be trying to find our identity in other people. You need to get away, she said, and listen to the voice that has been speaking to you all along.

“So go”, she said, “Twenty minutes of solitude. Go where they can’t find you.” And she released us into the woods.

There at my faded red cabin, back pressed up against the low wall, it took a long time for my heart to stop thump-thumping in my chest. It took longer for my breathing to slow, and it took longer still for my thoughts to settle. By now I was crying, all the emotion of the month pushing out of me slowly. My mind was churning, but I didn’t have the energy to fight it anymore. I just sat and stared into the woods.

After a long time I noticed the swamp cabbage lining the creek bed. The leaves looked over-sized, like a prehistoric display in a museum. Suddenly, a bird chittered ten feet above my head. I laughed with surprise. The smell of the wet pine needles lifted up on a small breeze, and I breathed in a deep draught of humid air.

1114159624_705676c9a9_oThe pipe was beginning to clear; there was room now to take it all in. There was room now to let some things go.

I remembered our speaker’s words: Solitude is being alone with God and hearing that you are loved. I grinned and spoke to the sky, “You have anything you want to say?”

There was no response, but that was okay. I already knew.

 

Photos by Ed Suominen and Sharon Mollerus

Talking on the Train

Posted on by under Guest, Together in Place

I had lunch with a stranger once in the crowded food court of Union Station in D.C. There were no empty tables and only a few empty seats. When I saw a woman sitting by herself at a table, I asked if I could join her. She readily agreed.

I was in between trains, a Chicago-to-D.C. leg behind me and the rest of the journey home to Philadelphia ahead. Asking to join a stranger at their table is not within my standard mode of operation. Perhaps it was the 17 hours I had just spent on the train that inspired my unusual behavior.

On long-haul trains, if you go to the dining car you sit with people. And if, like me, you enjoy passing the hours of train travel in the observation car watching the country roll by, then you sit with people there too. On a long-haul train, you chat and really listen to the answers because you have all of the time and none of the cell signal. This slow-paced, low-pressure atmosphere makes my people-loving introvert-self bloom.

Between the trip out to Chicago and the ride back East, I spent almost 40 hours there-and-back talking to strangers. I met a man in the midst of his journey home from Thailand. He told me about an ex-wife and a child in Peru—how his world travels introduced him to people, but pulled them away too. He bought me a drink and we talked for hours as the view of the countryside gave way to midnight blackness. Eventually he asked me, “Are you happy?” I told him I was, mostly. He nodded, leaned back in his chair, and stared off into the darkness outside. His eyes had said more: that being happy was something he didn’t quite understand.

One morning after a few bumpy hours of sleep as the train chugged through Ohio and into Pennsylvania, I went to breakfast and was seated at a table with a woman. She asked me about my life. I asked her about hers. We lingered over our coffee as she told me about working with Catholic Social Justice groups in her teens, trying to end capital punishment. The fact that people still fight for the same thing today gave her mixed emotions. I told her about my Christian Social Ethics coursework—what I was learning about inequality and how the church participates. I told her it was encouraging to meet her. She said the same of meeting me.

Amtrak observationSeven-hundred miles of steel track is enough space for strangers to share many years of memories. You can settle in with wine or coffee. You can relax into the seat. The scenery of fields and small towns is buffer enough for the natural pauses. There is no hurry; your stop is likely states away.

After joining fellow travelers for those many miles, to join a woman sitting at a table alone in a crowded food court seemed natural. As she told me about how she spends her days, the realization that she was homeless began to dawn on me. I took a second look at the food she had in front of her—one small order of fries. I told her I was finished eating and asked if she would like any of my leftovers. I think if I had thought about that a bit more, I would not have asked for fear of insulting her. She took my offer though and gladly ate what I did not. I eventually wished her a good day and a safe walk back to her night shelter, thanked her for allowing me to join her table, and went to board my train to Philadelphia.

This second-to-last last part of my journey was on a regional Amtrak train, which means smaller seats and less room to move about. My seat-mate told me about his job in the banking industry, seeming proud of his achievements as a district manager. Before long he had his laptop out, taking advantage of the Wi-Fi.

In Philadelphia, I switched from Amtrak to regional rail for the journey out to the suburbs, choosing a seat next to a woman who had on head-phones. The train car was silent but for the noise of the tracks and the intermittent stop announcements.

The transition was stark. Our day-to-day lives are not built for long chats and shared meals with strangers. Yet, people’s complicated lives exist even when we are just commuting home to the suburbs. Homeless people, lonely people, overlooked people. People who are on a journey to somewhere—people who fight for equality and people who wonder if it’s really possible to be happy—these people are always next to me.

It is of course easier to say that I want to engage than to actually engage. The meeting and eating and talking together requires intentionality on the part of all the participants. When I can remember that the people around me have stories of lives lived full of heartbreak and hope, then I am more willing to keep my eyes open for ways I can give. Even if what I have to give in the moment is only a listening ear or my not-yet-finished lunch.

*    *    *    *    *

fall“Talking on the Train” was written by Nicole Morgan. Nicole’s first long-distance train trip involved Thanksgiving dinner with a dining-car table full of strangers. She booked a sleeper-car once and loved it for all its nostalgic charm, but much prefers coach class where there’s plenty of time and room to meet her traveling neighbors. Nicole writes about bodies, theology, and community at jnicolemorgan.com  and tweets away @jnicolemorgan

 

 

Together, Undefined

Posted on by under Together in Place

It was 8 pm on my daughter’s 15th birthday, and I remained a Mama on a Mission, gearing up for the home stretch.

The mission, of course, was making my daughter feel as special and loved as possible—a mission that’s more challenging, I’ve discovered, when your children are teenagers and less likely to buy into the enthusiasm in your voice as you sell them on some random idea: Bowling would be a fun birthday treat! If my daughter had her way we’d be seeing Broadway shows in New York for her birthday, but in reality I had less to work with.

By 8 pm on this particular birthday, we had already completed our typical activities: a mother-daughter outing (which in this case involved a new ear piercing); a birthday dinner at the restaurant of her choice, with the seven people who make up her immediate family (mom, dad, sister, stepmom, half-brother, stepdad, step-sister); and finally dessert and presents back at home. My now-15-year-old already had a big party with friends the night before, so now what?

“Do you want to go anywhere?” I asked.

“No, I just want to be home,” she said, smiling contentedly.

“Should we rent a movie?” I suggested. “Or play a game?” I know very well that games are not her favorite pastime, but I couldn’t help myself. In my family experience, both as a child and an adult, this is what you do when you’re together: You play games. Sitting around a table covered with the pieces of a game is my family’s quintessential definition of togetherness.

“No, I just want to be home and do whatever,” she said, a trace of exasperation edging into her voice. “I’ve had an amazing birthday! Can’t we all just be here but do our own things?”

As an extrovert, I (not for the first time) had to pause and forcibly wrap my head around this less structured version of “Together.” I could see my other daughter re-calibrating as well, as we tried to imagine that the birthday girl’s idea of a fun birthday might not look exactly like our plans for her. After all, we were there to serve! To entertain! To focus all of our time and energies on HER! And she wanted to go up to her room and try out the new guitar pedal she just unwrapped? We had to let that sink in.

“Well…OK. If you’re sure,” I said.

She was, of course, sure.

6647530355_0233217d07_zAs the sounds of reverberating electric guitar and my daughter’s pure voice serenaded us through the ceiling, the rest of us looked at each other in somewhat sheepish agreement: Let’s play a game. In her own way, she was right there with us.

*   *   *   *   *

While I probably wouldn’t choose “alone in my room” as a way to spend my birthday evening, upon a bit more reflection I realized that I know a thing or two about this desire my daughter often has: to be together yet alone.

Since February 2002, after nearly a decade of working in populated office settings, I’ve worked essentially alone, as a writer. When I was in the process of deciding whether to take the leap and start my own business, my biggest fear wasn’t Will I have enough clients? or Will I make enough money? It was this: Will I be able to work alone?

Not only am I social—someone who is energized by being in the mix, having people to go to lunch with, and feeling connected to others who are dealing with the same bosses and projects—but I’m also most creative in collaborative settings. In other words, I worried not just that I would be lonely working by myself, but also that the very skills I was selling might fall flat if there weren’t people around to bounce ideas off of and provide critique.

I decided to take the leap anyway, and was lucky enough to discover that technology was my safety net. It was the growing availability of wireless Internet, in particular, that prevented me from gradually slipping away from myself, sitting day after day at the desk in the corner of my living room. Wireless Internet meant I could take my laptop—all that really comprised my “office”—to my favorite neighborhood coffee shop, where I could be together yet alone.

photo (3)In that coffee shop, I learned it was the mere presence of bodies and voices—being surrounded by activity and the gears of many brains thinking and creating—that I craved more than anything else. In the unnatural silence of my empty home I felt slightly on-edge and easily distractible, but the buzzing white noise of the café allowed me to dive into my work and ride a stream of creative flow for hours.

There’s simply something powerful—at once comforting and freeing—about being autonomous yet in community, whether that community is family or strangers at a café. It’s an experience that carries a certain rightness and balance: In a single moment and place, it acknowledges and respects both our “sameness” as humans and our “difference” as individuals.

Ultimately, both identity and empathy are strengthened through that single form of togetherness. When I think of it that way, I can see what a wonderful gift it was to give my teenage daughter on her birthday—and what a wonderful reminder it was for her to share with me.

*   *   *   *   *

Photo of the game “Carcassonne” by Aslakr. Coffee shop photo by Kristin Tennant.

Where I Came From: Stories from the Hunt

Posted on by under Welcome to You Are Here

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

~ T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets

Ever since the 1960s, the Turner family has gone on a goose hunt the weekend before Thanksgiving in Eagle Lake, Texas, the self-proclaimed goose hunting capital of the world.  These hunts are visceral experiences with blood, guns, and excruciatingly miserable conditions involving 4 AM wakeups, late November temperatures, wet rice fields, and four hours of sitting in those wet rice fields. They are an acquired taste even for most avid hunters.

“Stories from the hunt” are an annual ritual performed generally the night before or the night after the hunt, and are lathered heavily in heart attack barbeque, beer, and gin and tonics. My grandfather, Jack Rice Turner, began taking my father when he was still an adolescent, and the stories of his first hunts still get retold year after year. They are told differently, but always with a twinkle in the eye of my grandfather who is the patriarch of the group we go hunting with and leads the way in all things Texan (i.e. drinking, shooting stuff, story telling, and general swashbuckling confidence (despite the fact that he is now barely over 5 feet tall as he has shrunk in his late 80s)). These stories always lead to my grandfather recalling more stories, from his 40 years in the Navy and Navy Reserve, 60 years of marriage to my grandmother who is one of the first women mayors in south Texas, and 50 years of being an architect along the Rio Grande River Valley. Amidst these stories, there will certainly be the hundredth retelling of the improbable three turkey kill with one rifle bullet (which I actually witnessed when my grandfather shot and killed two turkeys with a rifle bullet, then had a third die by what I can only postulate was a heart attack), the retelling of the turkey stolen by a bobcat story, and the always memorable telling of the other immaculate shot my grandfather managed: the double Canadian Goose in flight shot, where with a single shot he managed to kill two 25 pound geese while they were flying.

These grandiose stories about my grandfather will be offset by some serious ribbing and stories full of hilarity. The story of my first hunt will be retold where I was enlisted as a retriever and had to chase down and corral geese almost the same height as my 7 year old soul; one goose actually ended up chasing me instead of me chasing it. Or the more recent, fresh story will be retold about my grandfather accidently shooting a very slow and low flying crane despite everyone yelling at him not to shoot it and then had to hide it when the game wardens came over to our hunt.

All of these stories form the fabric of several generations of family hunts, but oddly, for many of these story telling events and even for some of the hunts themselves, I was not there. When I was younger, my introversion and love of books led me to spend large chunks of the these hunts reading books. In sixth grade, I spent most of the hunt reading The Lord of the Rings, in seventh, C.S. Lewis’ space triology, in 8th, the Count of Monte Cristo. I would barely leave my room while I was reading. I preferred the companionship of my books over my family, and in an all-too-familiar refrain in my life, I escaped into myself. When I got older and found myself adrift, in and out of college and in and out of seasons of depression, there were several years where I didn’t even go to the hunt with my family. I was so reclusive and lost in my own world I could not find it in myself to go to the one thing my grandfather and my father loved the most. They loved having their sons, their friends, and their stories, but I did not love myself, nor know myself, nor want to find myself in my grandfather and his stories.

In the past five years, we have been back to Eagle Lake several times. I have been back three times. We have welcomed a brother-in-law, we have shared stories, and I have watched my grandfather. We have witnessed the sunrise amidst the torrent of a thousand rising geese burning up the sky with their black, brown, and white flying V’s as their honking calls roar down on us like the thunder and wind of a sweeping Texas storm. And as I write, these are the sights I see more vividly than anything else my childhood holds, and I feel the rise and catch in my throat like I once felt when I first read about the Riders of Rohan charging down into Helms Deep in The Lord of the Rings, and I see the twinkling eyes of my grandfather, and I remember this is who I am from, this is from where I came.