Your Body is a Wonderland

During the month of April, we are exploring beauty in nature and life. The best thing about this series is that not only am I learning more, but also noticing more good stuff. Thanks for joining me. For the best reading experience and formatting, you can view this post on my website by clicking here.

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

— Psalms 19:1

Just before Mother’s Day a few years ago, I was out shopping with my friend, Ginny. We were looking at spring flowers at Pike’s Nursery, and inside they had this display of terrariums.

So cute!
So little!
So alive!

I bought one for my myself and my mom, boasting that these mini gardens would never die. We could snub them with our shriveled, brown thumbs and still they would live on!

Except they didn’t.

Mine first. Then my mom’s.

What happened?

I first learned about self-sustaining terrariums in third grade. Our class built one together. These mini ecosystems are really cool because if you do them right, they’re mainentence-free and last “forever.” However, this sealed terrarium must be able to clean, feed, and restore itself. If you think that sounds impossible, you’re right! The rules for proper terrarium care can be intimidating:

You’ ve got a checklist that includes choosing:

1. The right plants.

2. The right container.

3. The right light.

4. The right water.

5. The right microfauna (insects).

“Ecosystem: a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment.””

— Dictionary.com

What I find fascinating about terrarium building is that each one is a tiny microcosm of the world we live in. This beautiful planet, delicate and fragile, pivots on an invisible axis as the heavens blaze all around it. Miraculously, it’s exactly the right size, contains both water and air, enjoys the sun from a comfortable and safe distance, and houses all the plants and animals it needs to function efficiently. Within this extra large sphere, smaller biomes exist. Everything works together with everything else to achieve harmony and balance.

But like all things in nature, they don’t exist indefinitely unchanged. Disruption is inevitable. In addition to the wide scale destruction leveraged by mass disasters, there’s extinction, and even tinier disturbances like the famous “butterfly effect." None of you were surprised when I told you that our world is basically just an extra large terrarium. Sure. It’s one of those things you accept as fact, like the earth is round or the sky is blue.

But did you know that your body is ALSO an ecosystem?

Why is this important?

This week, I attended a Brain Health Forum hosted by Emory University’s Goizueta Center for Alzheimer’s Research. Over and over again, the researchers stressed the relationship between healthy habits and functional living. Like that terrarium that needs water and light, your body needs different kinds of energy to thrive. If you neglect one aspect, the whole body suffers. But humans are notoriously stubborn and weak and we live in denial about a lot of things. When it comes to how we care for our own bodies, we’re especially deceptive. We would prefer to cherry-pick our healthy habits by negotiating bargains like these:

• I’ll exercise, but I’m not going to quit drinking alcohol.

• I’ll practice good oral health, but I’m not going to get eight hours of sleep every night.

• I’ll spend time learning a new skill, but I’m not going to give up fat and sugar.

Maybe you’ve told yourself that by the time your brain or heart begins to fail, science will have invented new drugs to stave off all the scary stuff. The problem is that you don’t wake up one morning, suddenly not able to remember what you did yesterday, or have a heart attack just because you sneezed really hard. These seemingly acute diseases fester over decades. And unfortunately, some drugs don’t even work if they’re started too late!

What CAN we do?

There’s a quote by author Anne Lamott that I’m applying here (slightly out of context):

What do we do during times of loss or general dread? WE DO WHAT’S POSSIBLE.

When faced with the IMPOSSIBLE, a great place to start is with this question:

What IS possible?

I came away from the forum feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information I ingested. These PhD/MD types use a lot of big words and talk really fast. But also—the body is complex, and because of the interconnectivity of the body’s systems, the medical professionals I heard from tended to focus on their hyper-specialized area of expertise.

Here’s what I took away from the day:

K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

1. Remember that what’s good for your heart is good for your brain.

2. Practice good sleep hygiene. (Make yourself a dedicated, distraction-free space that’s cool, comfortable, and devoid of light and sound pollution)

3. Depression and anxiety are risk factors for cognitive decline. Do not be afraid to ask for help when you need it, and stay connected socially.

4. Take care of your teeth. (So weird, but oral bacteria can travel to your brain and affect memory.)

It would be so easy—and no one would blame you—if you also came away from a lecture like that thinking, “It’s too hard. I can’t do all the things I need to do to stay healthy, so I might has well do nothing!”

A tiny part of you might be right. It’s true. You drop the ball on any one of these directives and your body will surely break down.

But I’m reminded of that Mother’s Day terrarium, short-lived though it was. Mine got too wet and mold started to grow. My mom placed hers too close to a sunny window and it dried out.

We did get to enjoy them for a little while. For a time, our beautiful terrariums brought so much joy and color into our homes. I may not have tended it to the degree that my gardening-loving-friend, Ginny, did hers, but I did what was possible for me.

A Lesson from Mrs. Jones, my favorite teacher ever

In third grade, I learned to appreciate the beauty of life. Through an engaging and interactive science project, I learned the importance of nurturing living things. There, my curiosity about the world was first sparked. Through practice, I became a steward of the land and gained a new understanding about the complexity of our natural world.

I have observed the power of the watermelon seed. It has the power of drawing from the ground and through itself 200,000 times its weight. When you can tell me how it takes this material and out of it colors an outside surface beyond the imitation of art, and then forms inside of it a white rind and within that again a red heart, thickly inlaid with black seeds, each one of which in turn is capable of drawing through itself 200,000 times its weight—when you can explain to me the mystery of a watermelon, you can ask me to explain the mystery of God.
William Jennings Bryan

The BIG Take-Away

The thing I’m learning most these days is that I don’t have to understand how everything works in order to appreciate my role in the ecosystems I inhabit. I want to harness my inner eight year-old, the girl who thought that collecting cool rocks, climbing trees, and making dandelion bracelets was the pinnacle of a fun afternoon.

Somewhere between those frivolous days spent outdoors cultivating curiosity, another girl emerged, a girl who became frustrated by all the things she didn’t know. Now I understand that there’s immense joy in being able to admire something and care for it and cultivate its beauty (even if you don’t fully “get” it)—not just in nature but in my marriage and in my children and in my friendships. I have a responsibility to be a faithful steward of the future. There are real consequences to neglecting the needs of organisms in the environment, the organizations we serve, and the organs in our bodies.

Knowing that my body is a complex network of nerves, blood vessels, enzymes and other tissues bound by both mind and soul actually inspires me take care of it more. Nothing stays the same, not our plants enclosed in their glass towers or our bodies wrapped in aging skin. That’s actually kind of cool. There’s always something new to explore and learn. All I really know is that I don’t want my body to break anytime soon. I’m not smart enough to fix all the things that could go wrong and paying someone else to do it will no doubt be very expensive.

That drug I mentioned earlier—the one that doesn’t even work if you start it too late—costs nearly $30,000/ year. (And nobody wants to drop that kind of cash for nothing!)

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The Key to Success in Business and Life...WOMEN?

This stat blew my mind:

Collective intelligence increases in proportion to the number of women on a team.

Note what does NOT increase Collective intelligence:

• IQ

• Group Satisfaction

• Group Cohesion

  Group Motivation

Surpised? Me too!

But I’m not surprised that women make teams better.

I’ve always thought that diverse perspectives and life experiences add value to any group gathering. Gender, race, education, religion, and geography add richness to even the smallest gatherings. But collective intelligence—that’s a new one!

Women make teams work smarter.

I find this fascinating because even though we live in a day and age when women truly can do anything, it hasn’t always been that way.

For many years, women were barred from many professions. The first professionally trained woman doctor didn’t start practicing medicine until 1849. That might seem like a long time ago, but considering the fact that women didn’t start entering medical school in larger numbers until the 1970s, progress has been slow at best. In some states, women were forbidden to own businesses or property. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 that employers were expressly forbidden from discriminating based on sex (in addition to religion, race, color, and national origin.) And believe it or not, a woman couldn’t even get a credit card without a male co-signer until the mid 1970s.

Fun Fact:

President Franklin D. Roosevelt may have been ahead of his time when he appointed Frances Perkins as the Secretary of Labor. In 1933, she became the first woman to hold a Cabinet position in a U.S. president's administration. (Currently, women make up more than half of President Biden’s cabinet.)

The researcher in the Harvard study points out that this increase in collective intelligence may be because women score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do. “What do you hear about great groups?” Anita Woolley asks. “Not that the members are all really smart but that they listen to each other. They share criticism constructively. They have open minds. They’re not autocratic. And in our study we saw pretty clearly that groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent groups.”

These findings correlate with Duhigg’s research in his book, Supercommunicators. Though he doesn’t specifically delineate between men and women, he does note that “supercommunicators,” the people who have the best ability to bring about connectivity within groups, are the people who listen closely to what’s said and unsaid, ask the right questions, match the mood of the room, and make their own feelings easy to perceive. I don’t know about you, but I find that many of the women I know often complain that their husbands are emotionally unavailable or uninterested in what their wives are thinking and feeling. (Honey, if you’re reading this, I’m not talking about you!)

Of course, we all want to believe that we are modern thinkers, that we value diversity in every setting, but the reality is that what we believe and how we act don’t always align.

Fourteen percent of the most influential companies in the world don’t have a single female board member. One surprising finding was in the area of fashion. Women, who spend nearly twice the annual amount on clothing every year than men, are notoriously underrepresented across the world in this industry. Just one third of apparel companies assessed publicly commit to promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment. Of these, just 16% set specific targets. One of my daughter’s favorite stores, Brandy Melville, is notoriously misogynistic. For years, I thought Ms. Melville was the brains behind the brand, but in reality, the founder is a man named Silvio Marsan and his son, Stefan, and Brandy Melville herself is actually the fictional tale of two people – Brandy, an American girl, and Melville, an English guy who met in Rome and fell in love and inspired the brand’s name and logo.

Some careers are equally filled by both men and women (marketing, human resources, and education). In recent years, some traditionally male-dominated industries are including more females.. Parity in both work and pay is on the rise! We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that equality is finally happening in industries like law enforcement, accounting and finance, culinary arts, and science. What IS surprising is that it took so long! Think about it—in two parent households, women generally make most of the purchase decisions for the family. They assume the role of disciplinarian, manage the cooking, and experiment daily, whether it’s helping with the 8th grade science project or trying to figure out how to grow a lemon tree in a climate not conducive to lemon trees.

It makes perfect sense that they would enter the workforce and want to be paid for these roles.

What can we learn?

I think it’s fair to say that any gathering that’s ALL MALE or ALL FEMALE will not be as strong as it could be.

The key to making smart decisions in any setting is to keep an open mind and allow all voices to be heard. Think about how you can incorporate this principle of equality in your families, book clubs, small groups, and business meetings. I also think it’s important for women to realize that there is NO reason to be intimidated in a room full of men. Because YOU are there, that room is smarter than they would be without you there. Wherever you go, your presence makes the place better.

The takeaway: To any male who happens to be reading this post:

If you want to be successful, make sure you have some women on your team.

Hey, the research proves it!

Was this article helpful? If so, please share with a friend. I write posts on Thursdays

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What Does it Mean to be a Mission Driven Woman?

I started Mission Driven Woman in 2018, in response to the behavior I was seeing in my friends’ lives. Educated, well-connected women were struggling to communicate their value in a world that shrugs off motherhood. They told themselves that duty called and then expressed regret over the talent and skills that suddenly seemed dormant, if not dead.

But we all know that dormant doesn’t mean dead.

In plants, dormancy is closely associated with environmental conditions. Some grasses go dormant in winter in order to conserve water and nutrients. Scientifically speaking, dormancy describes a state of quiet rest.

Do I even have to tell you about all the studies that have been done touting the importance of both quiet and rest?

Funny thing: I’ve yet to meet a mother who gets to enjoy an abundance of QUIET or REST.

You know what that means? We’re not dormant!

I think women go through a process of transformation akin to something that’s common in the insect world: holometabolism. You probably know it as metamorphosis. Insects such as butterflies, beetles, and bees undergo this common and complicated form of maturation.

Inside the cocoon of a butterfly, for example, the caterpillar is broken down and turned into something new. A caterpillar disintegrates from the inside out, using digestive juices to literally consume its own body. The new cells it creates are called imaginal cells, and imaginal cells are undifferentiated cells that can become any type of cell!

Anything at all! IMAGINE that!

Isn’t that what we’re doing when we take a break to build our family and raise kids?

We think we’re going to seed (aka dormant), when the reality is we’re transforming (holometabolizing) by creating our very own imaginal cells.

My Mom’s Story

My own mother got married young by today’s standards. She was only 19. At 22, she got pregnant with me and dropped out of college. I had two brothers born a few years later. Our family was very traditional. Mom stayed home and did all the cooking and cleaning, and my dad went away to work. Then when I was in high school, my mom got a job too: She began driving a school bus. And I don’t know, but maybe there were some people who said, “Man, that’s what happens when you don’t finish college.”

Why do you think she did that? Got that job? Do you think it was because it was the only job she could get?

Trust me—she didn’t drive the school bus because that’s all she could do. She drove it because it was one of the choices available to her in that season of life.

Hard choices require us to access our values.

My mom drove the bus so she could have the flexible schedule of someone who worked for the school system. She drove the bus so our family could have access to health insurance while my dad transitioned into new work that would challenge him in new ways and also afford our family additional opportunities for both education and recreation.

Then, in 2000, with her kids finally all grown up and graduated from high school, my mom started a new adventure in a response to a problem my dad shared with her. At the time, he was a lobbyist for a trade association of child welfare organizations, and during the legislative season, he spent the majority of his day tracking down government notices at the state Capitol.

Together, they created an electronic tracking system that freed up time and space at the Capitol for not only my dad, but all lobbyists. This technology did not exist before my parents created it! Now my dad is retired, and my mom still runs the business, adding new clients and continuing to innovate every year for a more streamlined process.

I’m quite certain my mom didn’t lay on the grass as a little girl, stare up at the clouds, and daydream about being a lobbyist.

But one thing I do know: She did have dreams.

And no one but her will ever know “what might have been.”

Nothing Wasted

Don’t let what might have been haunt you. No experience is ever wasted. We get to take our dreams as inspiration, then use our very own “imaginal cells” to turn what’s in our brains into something usable and totally brand new.

We live in a time of incredible prosperity and creativity, when it’s entirely possible to create brand news ways not only of earning money but of serving the world.

Ask yourself: Who do I want to become during this uncertain time? In this season, what choices are available to me?

For many women who dreamed of becoming something different than what they are today, the future can feel hopeless because the present is tinged with loneliness, apathy, and insignificance.

I don’t want that for you.

Remember: a season is just a season. All living things go through periods that feel like death.

Renewal awaits.

This week, look out for three short blog posts that are all about combating those feelings inadequacy. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Know someone who needs this encouraging message today? Please feel free to forward to a friend!

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