Fragment

I pulled into my driveway, just getting home from the airport from another work trip. It was a Friday night around midnight. As I backed into the garage, the headlights of my car landed on the peonies in our perennial garden. They stood straight and powerful like sentries, gathering their energy to bloom.

There they were, almost three feet tall, and I hadn’t even noticed them starting to grow.

I began to cry.

These feelings surprised me. I didn’t know I was sad. But it had been a long week—a long, rewarding week—and I was exhausted. I was thinking about my partner already asleep inside the house, how he had been alone all week, not complaining at all about me being gone, and yet there I was missing everything, including him and the arrival of spring.  

How did this become my life? I thought.

I don’t want to be on the road every week. I don’t want to miss the wind catch the apple blossoms in the trees around our yard. I don’t want to miss the hostas and day lilies poking through the earth. I don’t want to miss sitting on the patio with my guy over dinner and glass of wine—especially this time of year, when the air is all about growth and hope and new life.

A day or two earlier, I was listening to Alexander Love speaking on a Coaches Rising podcastabout wholeness and fragmentation. Love suggested that we periodically pause and ask ourselves, “How do I feel right now?” 

In that moment, my answer: Sad. 

Love suggested in these moments, we can follow that feeling with, “Is this a voice of fragmentation, or a voice of wholeness?” 

For me, that moment was fragmentation.

I was feeling overwhelmed. Yet I know I have lots of different feelings. I have parts that love to be out there in the world socializing. I have parts that want to hole up with a book on a chair in a corner at home and read. I have parts that love what I do—helping individuals and organizations do good in the world. And parts that miss being at home doing nothing.

Earlier that day, I had been talking to a retired doctor who said he had loved his job so much that he often forgot it was work. I often feel the same way—I have to remind myself that this is a job—that I get paid to do this. To do what I love.

On the podcast, Alexander was sharing that after reflecting on a feeling like this, we might ask next, “Can that sad part step aside?” 

This concept comes from internal family systems work. We don’t ask those parts we don’t want to be with to step aside forever—just in the moment. So, later, when we can come from a place of wholeness (in my case, after a good night’s sleep), we can give them some attention to that feeling or perspective, but from a different, more holistic place. 

But we might ask them to step aside, so we can connect more with the resourceful part inside. The part that knows this feeling will pass. 

I knew on that late Friday night that I needed to get some rest, and all would be better the next day. From that rested place, I could connect more to the wholeness part of me. It helped me in that moment to acknowledge that my sadness was coming from fragmentation. It was coming from a tired place. A split place. A worried about the world place. 

These parts that we have can be sneaky. They can take over, especially if we are not paying attention. But we can ask those parts that might not be helpful in a particular moment to step aside—even just for a breath.

On the podcast, they also shared the idea of entelechy, which is a beautiful word that means the realization of potential. Alexander and Veronica Olalla Love and Lorie Dechar shared that every seed has in it entelechy—its own wholeness and future built into it. “There is a directionality there,” they said—just like the peonies in my garden, there is a future that is waiting to be birthed in a tiny grain or seed. 

We, too, as humans have in us the possibility to fulfill our potential. We are born with it. It is in the seed that gave us light.

So, next time I come home on a Friday night exhausted from the accomplishments of the week, I will remember that this fragment and that fragment and the other fragment all connect together to make the beautiful, complex whole that is me.