Almost every day since posting my December blog, I’ve been reflecting more deeply on Mom’s 34 -LY Words to Live and Die By. I’ve been posting more thoughts over at Instagram for each word. Today’s word is Alternately.
Alternately, the way to recognize the choices you have to change direction as needed. You can always choose a new way.
Alternatively, it might mean to alternate between two options. On again, off again. This or that. To and fro. Stop and go. Rest and resume. This now, not that any longer.
My mom once reminded me even the astronauts make countless changes—course corrections—on their way to the moon. There is no straight path.
But there are choices.
I love Anne Hillman’s poem, We Look With Uncertainty (here’s the opening):
We look with uncertainty
beyond the old choices for
clear-cut answers
to a softer, more permeable aliveness
which is every moment
at the brink of death;
for something new is being born in us
if we but let it.
Choices for clear-cut answers are no longer part of our world. Uncertainty is. We live in the VUCA world—volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous.
But what if we reframe the VUCA acronym with more life-giving words? I’ve been seeking alternatives to VUCA for years, ever since coming across the acronym while writing The Courage Way. I doubt there’s such a thing as simplicity on the other side of complexity. (That’s why my mission for Creative Courage Press is to create more courage for the complexity of being human.) Can we embrace uncertainty?
I created this grid with possible alternatives for VUCA. I invite you to add your own. Just while drafting this post, I’ve debated using undaunted, undeterred or unusual. I like naming our new world as unusual. Which adverbs or adjectives would you pick for a creating a new VUCA world? For V, U, C, and A?
I love how the threads of time keep weaving new meaning when paired with new insights.
I love Hillman’s phrase “more permeable Aliveness.” It reminds me of Daanan Parry’s “Parable of the Trapeze (see the text on Earthstewards.org and this Awesome video below). Thanks to generous sharing by a Courage & Renewal facilitator in Canada in 2015, I first discovered this video and we shared it in a Words of EnCOURAGEment blog back then. And then I met a physician who, after receiving that newsletter, was inspired to use the video as a “third thing” to reflect with her colleagues during a difficult organizational transition. I wrote about her leadership journey and “the courage to trust” in The Courage Way, chapter 4.
Parry describes life like a series of trapeze swings:
Most of the time, I spend my life hanging on for dear life to my trapeze-bar-of-the-moment. It carries me along at a certain steady rate of swing and I have the feeling that I'm in control of my life.
I know most of the right questions and even some of the answers.
Then he sees life in the transition zone as “my aliveness coming to get me.”
When I watched the video again today, I was delighted to hear the word alternatives. See if you spot it.
Just because I offer a reframe of VUCA doesn’t mean I’m suggesting replacing it. I believe in practicing paradox. I believe that it’s both old and new for a long while. We will live alternately between both words, ideally with hope not despair.
How might you recognize and trust “a more permeable aliveness” in your inner world, in your Self, in your aliveness coming to get you?
What would living alternately look like for you?
What words might you collect as alternates for VUCA?
Click here to play along and crowdsource some courage Fill in this form with your picks for new VUCA words. (I’ve always wanted to see these words in a dropdown menu!) When you do, I’ll send you a link to the free opening chapters of The Courage Way book and you’ll see a link to a tally of all the responses).
Remember, “something new is being born in us / if we but let it.”
p.s. A is for amaryllis, which I love watching unfold and bloom every new year.