From Falling Back to Springing Forward

[a continued musing upon and expansion of Getting in My Own Way]

When I was in the midst of my dissertation research, attempting to articulate a theory of fallback, it was autumn in the United States. At the time, developmental researcher, author, practitioner extraordinaire, and one of my research key thinkers, Jennifer Garvey Berger, lived in New Zealand where they were just emerging from winter. There was a period of that research season, as we wrangled our calendars trying to find a date and time for our next interview, that Jennifer and I were actively in the discussion of the precise days that I would fall back and she would spring forward. 

And for those of you who may doubt that these occurrences of falling back and springing forward are predictable but who may also have your interest piqued in how they could be possible, let me clarify.  In the U.S. when we turn our clocks back one hour in the fall in submission to the ever-infuriating (for me) daylight saving time, we refer to this act of fealty as “falling back.” And when we turn our clocks forward in the spring in gleeful celebration of the long-awaited return to sanity (for me), we call it “springing forward.”  It’s a way for us to remember which direction the clocks are supposed to move in this arcane ritual of temporal, developmental fallback-inducing (for me), crazy-making (for most).

Of course, Jennifer and I couldn’t help but grasp onto these timely (see what I did there?) cultural linguistics as we inquired into the criteria of fallback.  And as we sought to understand and erect the parameters of what is fallback and what is not, Jennifer offered, upon deep reflection into her own lived experience and her accompaniment of others’, that in order for it to be fallback, there must also be spring forward – a return to at least the place you had fallen back from, if not additionally catapulting you further along. 

You may have noticed that I am smitten by metaphorical and linguistical turns of phrase. The fallback and spring forward language was no exception. I embraced it whole-heartedly and even employed the clever dual meaning (that I later learned may only be clever in the U.S. as pertains to its time-of-year, clock-manipulating, instructiveness, at least) as the title of an article, “From Fallback to Spring Forward: Bringing our better selves in times of complexity.”

And later, having been inspired by the brilliant visual designer and human, Kate Rutter, when she informed me she was dedicating time on the day in the fall when we move our clocks back to reflecting on her own experiences of fallback that year, that I decided to publish Fallbook, (more properly titled Leaving the Ghost Light Burning: Illuminating Fallback in Embrace of the Fullness of You) on Fallback Day.

But somewhere along the way, the spring forward aspect of the fallback / spring forward requisite coupling got left behind…at least in my more broadly outward facing communications. 

Sure, in my actual practice and work with individuals and groups, in the Ghost Light framework itself, and even in Fallbook, I map out the paths that connect our coming into relationship with our fallback to our increased capacities to grow. I illuminate the gifts of discovery, of how seeing what we were heretofore blind to, of integrating our earlier selves with the later, actually makes us bigger. I facilitate exploration and practices that invite folks into an articulation of their intentions (where their bigger self resides), and we imagine and strategize who and what else may need be there to allow them to meet these.  We engage the practices that research shows leads to developmental growth. And our fallback and our courage in coming to know it intimately, is the catalyst that allows this transformation of meaning-making to occur. 

Yet in my communications, in my marketing, in the places where I might bring the fluidity of adult development into the light more prominently, I focus primarily on our inevitable falling back, not the potentialities of how we may also, in the process, spring forward – how we might grow.

Once again, I get in my own way. And upon reflection, I suspect that Righteous One is the character who is standing sentry, fearful that if I name “growth” out loud, I’ll belie my flag-waving for the gifts of our smaller selves.  In my adherence and loyalty to making our understanding of development more robust, more nuanced, more real and true, I’ve trapped the pendulum on one side.  I’ve been preferentially righteous (as may, of course, be a primary criteria for the latter adjective), and in the process I’ve begun to understand the ways that this renders me Dead Right…and I’m also coming to realize the ways in which I’ve been Dead Wrong. 

I, myself, have undermined the fullness of development that I have sought to champion by emphasizing our forays into the abyss, to the exclusion of the springboard these often provide to a greater expansiveness in our ways of seeing and being ourselves, our ways of seeing and being in the world.  And if the possibility of growth is what emboldens us to step into the darkness of our inevitable declines, that, too, is okay.

So, here ye, here ye, as we approach this Spring Forward Day (in the U.S.) let me mark its jubilant place on both the Gregorian calendar (the U.S., legislatively dictated version, at least) and in the unfolding calendar of our development! Let us celebrate our courage in holding steady in discovery of the tethers that make themselves known to us again and again as they bring us back, as we also celebrate the developmental steps & skips & bounds that coming into relationship with our fallback allows, a moving closer to and beyond the edge of our current knowing – a knowing that has yet to be revealed. 

Let us honor those concepts we hold whose mutuality are integral to our understanding of and our potentiality to embrace them.

Day and Night

Life and Death

Small Self and Big Self

Growth and Decline

Falling Back and, yes, Springing Forward, too.

Yoann Bourgeois Captivates Audience with Powerful Performance About Life ( Original Video by Mathieu Stern )