Right now, all over the world people in Guiding and Scouting are celebrating the joint birthdays of their founders Robert and Olave Baden-Powell. Guides call it Thinking Day, Scouts call it Founder’s Day, but it’s all the same celebration, thankfulness for the things that Guiding and Scouting have brought to the world.

All day, I’ve been thinking about what Guiding means to me.

I’m not technically a member right now, but I volunteer when my sister Neece (or anyone else) needs me, and I just sent in a entry for the Guides Canada blog.  I still feel connected to Guiding, I honour the goals of the organization, and I’m looking for ways to use my skill set to the Guides’ advantage. I’m not yet totally involved, but I always feel the pull to give back to the organization that I love.

Guiding was a vital part of the formation of my feminist perspective – one of the guiding (ha!) principles of my life. There were other contributing factors of course (my parents, my teachers, my friends), but Guiding was a huge movement that told me that I was okay just as I was.

Here I am in my Guide uniform. Can you find me?

When I was in Guiding, my competence was assumed. Just think about that, how huge that is. I was a ten year old girl and my competence was assumed.

Ten year old girls have to be one of the most dismissed groups on the planet, yet in Guiding,  my leaders and my program expected that I could do or learn to do whatever needed to be done.  My competence at leading a group, carrying a bucket of water, setting up a tent, tying knots, learning a language, doing a science badge, was never in question. Instead, it was treated as a given.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t supposed to ask for help, help was always offered and encouraged, but it was assumed that all of these little girls could carry heavy things, cook meals on a camp stove, run fast, climb high, go on adventures, and learn and execute complicate tasks. Never once was I told to do or not to do something because I was a girl.

What a treat for any kid, but especially for a ten year old girl in 1982. In many other arenas I was put down, shut up, directed to be lady-like (ha!), but for two hours each week and seven days in the summer, I was free to be myself. My strong, competent, opinionated, self.

Yes, not only was it okay for me to be competent, but it was also okay for me to be opinionated – imagine! In school I did a bit of blending, making myself a bit smaller so I wouldn’t disturb the order of things,  so I wouldn’t get the attention of the guys who were intent on keeping girls ‘in their place.’ I feigned squeamishness and silliness, not all the time, but enough to make me feel sad about it.

At Guides though I could take up my full share of the space. And it was fantastic.

I wonder, if I hadn’t had that public arena of Guiding, would I have been a different person? Would my feigned squeamishness and silliness become real? Would my smaller self have become my whole self? Would I have been lost?

I don’t know, and I hope not, but I’m glad I didn’t have to find out.

Happy Thinking Day, Guides!

Keep taking up your full space – the world needs every part of you.

Every year I think that this is going to be the summer that we do all the fun things. I think that I am going to make the most of each day and really make sure that the boys have the kind of summers I remember from when I was a kid.

I always want to use the summer to make a leap forward in skills and to make sure the kids can learn some new things all while having lots of time to relax.

The flaw in this plan, of course, is that the kids have an entirely different idea of what makes for fun relaxation than I do. And the tension between their idea of fun and mine can be really draining.

And I find that I never plan the summer quite early enough (June disappears on me each year) and if I don’t make a plan then I drift through my days untethered and so do the kids.

Then I find myself at the end of the summer, torn between the desire to just let them do whatever the hell they want for those last few days before school and the desire to drag them to every last ‘fun’ thing I can think of.

The end of summer carries with it a twinge of regret then, for the summer mom I meant to be, and the summer family I hoped we’d become.

Here’s the catch though. We had lots of fun this summer. A great vacation to Gros Morne and to see the Viking settlement in L’Anse Aux Meadows. We spend a few days in Terra Nova at our beloved Sandy Pond. We hung out in the backyard, we had BBQs with friends, the kids played games and had water fights, and they found lots of time to play video games without driving me completely crazy.

So, I guess this is one of those situations that comes up in mindfulness/zen literature all the time. The problem is less about what is than about me not accepting what is.

I need to let go of my vision, and see the fun we had, and the fact that despite a long summer together, my kids still get along well 95% of the time.

The fact is, there were lots of times, maybe even every day that I looked at my family and thought ‘Yes, THIS is what it is all about.’ What could make for a better summer (or any time) than that?

So, part of my practice for the next 119 days is to remember that I cannot change what is already happening, but I can decide how to feel about it and how to react to it.

For those of you who know me in real life, I haven’t lost my mind. I’m not pretending I can become one of those people who just accept what comes at them and go with the flow. I need structure and I need plans (that’s what I am trying to teach myself how to do in the next four months), and when I plan for my future self, it makes my days go much more smoothly.

BUT even as I plan for times to come, and figure out how to make things go a little more in the direction I am hoping, I am still going to try to just accept what actually happens I am going to try not to create misery for myself by creating dissonance between what is and what I feel ‘should be.’ That’s a surefire way to be unhappy.

I am committing to finding the ways that my family can be at its best, but I am not willing to sacrifice fun along the way.

So, begone, summer regrets – you don’t serve me well. Instead, I’m going to turn that wistful feeling to the good and realize that while summer is the most ‘free’ time of year, there is still plenty of fun to be had in fall and in winter, and my search for structure will help create more space for that.

Yesterday, my day got chopped up into little pieces and because I hadn’t scheduled a time to write, I ended up late at night with next to nothing written.

Today, the same thing happened (although to be fair to myself, I did have to help take everything out of the basement, go to a four hour workshop, and host The Boy’s birthday party, so I am going to totally let myself off the hook for today).

Clearly, having a time to write is as crucial as picking a time to exercise.

I didn’t pick a time to write this and now I’m exhausted and I am choosing to take good care of myself and head to bed. That makes this post a kind of a placeholder for the post I meant to produce.

Check back tomorrow for a real post.

I’ve spent a good chunk of this weekend at a storytelling workshop, learning how to hone my stories and give them a bigger life than my current version gives them. It was tough, standing up in front of a group of other tellers, telling this story that wasn’t quite ready to be told* because I didn’t have all the details down, I hadn’t quite found the right path into the story yet. This wasn’t a vicious group, not by any means (storytellers are invariably able to tell you the good things they found in your story) but it was still unnerving.

It was very much worth the discomfort of the situation though, because I want to be a better storyteller. It was another of those types of situations where I could put aside my immediate pain for the gain of improving my stories (I like how many of those I have discovered lately – good to use as reminders that I can do that).

A certain level of storytelling comes naturally to me.  I come from a family where stories are valued, and being able to remember the odd things someone said, or a funny thing that someone did, is encouraged. We love to use stories as round about ways of explaining things, and we can draw parallels between pretty disparate things by using a good narrative.  When I began visiting friends on my own as a kid, I was surprised to discover that not everyone’s family does this, that not everyone knows about the foolish tricks their father played on their uncles as a kid, or the way their mom used to wear her jeans as a teenager.

But as much as that comes naturally to me, I still have a lot to learn. I still need a lot of practice, and I still need to increase my repetoire,  and not just to have stories to drag out as entertainment. I need all of these storylines so I can help people. I’ve found that having so many stories at my disposal has helped me figure out how to comfort people in many tough situations, it has helped me reframe people’s self-narrative so it becomes more empowering to them, and it has helped me show others where their opponents might be coming from in an argument. Being able to say ‘What about if…’ and either run with a story I know, or develop one on the spot, is one of the skills I value most and so I want to hone that to as sharp a point as possible. If standing up in front of a group with a half-done story is the way to do that, well, I will suffer through.

Telling people stories is one gift I can give, telling people a kinder version of their own stories is a far greater one.

*when I was telling someone about it earlier, I compared it to going to a baking contest and then allowing them to judge my cookie dough against other people’s cookies.