Episode 80: the reformer

Wednesday, June 24

Jana: My mom died seven years ago and we dealt, I think, pretty efficiently with the things that were not emotional. You know, taking furniture to Goodwill and donating books to the library, things like that, but anything that was emotional, her letters, her journals, photographs, we've essentially boxed up and put in our basement. The initial plan was that I was going to go through them within those first few months after mom died.

And I found that I just was not emotionally ready to do that. So Phil just said, okay, we will put this off and take as much time as you need. I started sheltering in place on March 12th. It was actually March 13th, I think, that I got out the first box and started going through it.
And that's been a really wonderful kind of thing to delve into my mother's history, and feel that strength from the past. There have been some unexpected discoveries. Like I found my great grandfather's World War 1 medical certificate. It's sort of this big thing and we framed it and it's hanging in the living room. He was a doctor in World War 1. It's dated August, 1917. He was already a practicing physician, I guess, at this time. But he volunteered to help and be part of the medical Corps. 

And there was something about that experience of having this artifact from the past, that he volunteered to help in a time of crisis. I wish he'd kept a journal because I would have really liked to hear about his experiences, particularly the following year when the 1918 pandemic came through. I mean, obviously we've all been thinking a lot about that. 

Some of the funnier things we're learning about all my mom's boyfriends that I didn't know about before she knew my dad. I also found an Amazon gift card from the late 1990s and it still worked. Like she never cashed it in. So that was sort of hilarious.
It's these little moments of light-heartedness . . . because I can spend a lot of time looking at the news, and it's very hard and depressing. My head can be a fairly intense place. 

Laura: That was Jana Riess, who is coming to us from Cincinnati, Ohio. Jana is something of an Enneagram expert, which is one reason I’m so excited to include her in this series. Here’s Jana.

Jana: I'm 50. I am married, just recently an empty nester.  I am a writer and editor and a scholar.  I edit books for authors, primarily historians and scholars, and spirituality writers. I'm an Enneagram one with probably both a two wing and a nine wing. I've edited a couple of books about the Enneagram including The Road Back to You and The Path Between Us. 

Laura: Those two books, the ones Jana edited, are some of my favorite books on the Enneagram. I’ll include them in my show notes for today. You may be wondering what this business is about the wings, which a few of our other Enneagram contributors have mentioned. The concept of wings is one of the things I appreciate about the Enneagram model, because it allows for a more nuanced view of each of the nine types of the Enneagram. Picture a circle with all nine types on the perimeter--like a clock, but with nine numbers instead of 12. Type 9 is at the top, then 1, 2, 3, and so on. Every number has another number on either side of it. So for a type 1 like Jana, there’s a 9 to the left, and a 2 to the right. 

These are her wings, which means that while she’s a 1 at her core, she can also sometimes behave like a 1 or a 9, depending on the situation. Most people have one wing that is stronger than the other, especially when they’re young. But for someone like Jana, who has spent a lot of time thinking about the Enneagram, and who has lived enough life to see herself evolve, it makes sense that both of her wings are strong. 

Jana: Beatrice Chestnut, who is one of the Enneagram teachers, has talked about COVID-19  as a time of forced awakening for people, and looking at this as a challenge, as a time to think about specific paths of growth and clarity for individuals and for society. As a 1 on the Enneagram, someone who is interested always in how do I improve myself, or how do I improve the world I'm living in, I think that sounds great! I'm all about  improvement and growth, and how can we make this better? So for me, it's been helpful to think about the time of sheltering in place and the uncertainty that we're facing as a time for  introspection and trying  to make  the world a better place
We are seeing some ugly things that have been suppressed for a long time come to light and that's important. And that is good. And I'm so glad that we're finally having conversations in this country about structural racism. But it is  also a very, very difficult time, and we are all going through a lot. 

I worry tremendously about the polarization that we're seeing in our country right now.  And for me personally, I hope that I can learn some more patience and, and be forgiving in the meantime, because everyone is going through a lot right now.  
I wouldn't say I necessarily feel afraid, but one of the things that I've been agonizing over here in this month of June has been what is the right thing to do in these particular circumstances? Is it the right thing to do to stay home from protests? Because I want to protect other people and protect myself from what may be a very dangerous virus that I could be carrying and not even know it. Or is the right thing to do to just throw that to the wind and contribute to this kind of embodied sense of racial justice and accompaniment? I don't know what the right thing is. 

My hopes are very much that we will find a treatment for this virus and possibly even a vaccine more quickly than the four-year timeline that has been the precedent before. All this talk about having a vaccine by October seems really amazingly unrealistic to the scientists in my family, so I trust them.  But we can hope for that in the future at some point. 
So far I have been primarily staying home. I have not been to a protest. I feel guilty about that, I guess. And that's a hard thing for a 1. We always want to be doing something that will help the world. And the thing that a 1 fears the most is being defective in some way, being wrong, being bad, being corrupt. We spend a lot of time worrying about ethics and what is the right thing to do in a particular situation? 
When I dream about what life could be like after COVID, I hope that we reform our healthcare system. That was the first answer that occurred to me.

And I think that is like, so stereotypically, a One thing to say, like, how are we going to come out of this better than when we went into it? And it's been so alarming to see how inadequate our healthcare system has been in meeting this particular crisis, this kind of patchwork piecemeal approach that we've had to profit-driven health care.

I'm not saying there's a perfect healthcare system, but we are so very far from getting the healthcare that everybody in this country really needs. And that's something I worry about a lot. Cause you know, there wasn't a long enough list of things for a one on the Enneagram to worry about.

What I need most right now is probably people. And I don't think I'm getting enough of that. I've been sheltering in place now for about a hundred days. It started on March 12th for me. My life was a mix of the work that I do from home, which is very solitary, but that's always been leavened with a lot of travel. I'm traveling to conferences to meet with authors or I'm working as an author and presenting my own work. For April, May, and June, I was supposed to be gone for 75% of the weekends in those months. And of course, every single one of those was canceled. So that's pretty depressing. I think as a 1, you know, 1s are kind of natural teachers. We tend to really enjoy the mentoring. We enjoy, frankly, being an expert in something. I miss teaching. I really miss it. And other than one online writing  retreat that I'm leading on August 28th--it's about how to write a spiritual memoir with Paraclete press--other than that I think I'm not doing any other teaching this summer. So that's the first time in my adult life that I haven't had a whole series of talks to give or conferences to go to. I'm sure that other people are really enjoying this  time of not having to prepare talks or something like that. I don't like it.  I tend to get my best ideas in community and in dialogue with other people. And I miss that profoundly. 

One of the nicest things that people have done for me throughout these last few months has just been to seek me out on Zoom or to hang out, play a game together online. That was very fun, and helped me get out of my head a little bit, because I do tend to work really hard. And I like in the evenings to just let that go and relax.  

The best thing about sheltering in place for me has been my husband, who is my favorite person.    We've been married for 28 years and it is, it's just very helpful to have him here all the time to have someone who I trust completely and can share my worries with. Share my joys with. 

We adopted this great dog right before the pandemic. He's about two years old and had only lived outside in kind of a hoarding situation where the woman who was keeping him had 46 dogs in kennels, outdoors. So he had never had any kind of socialization with people. Sometimes those first few weeks, you know, he would just get her away.

Every time one of us came near, he didn't want to really be in the same room with us. But very gradually he has come around and come to trust us  in a way that I find so heartening and beautiful. He's just a great dog. That's been lovely. I love the conversations that I have with our neighbors, where we're just standing on our porches and catching up with what's going on in our lives. And also to get outside, that's very important these days. And I hope that all of us are  able to get a little bit closer to each other and see each other's humanity.

People have done some very nice things for us. Someone from my church brought communion over and we shared that in a socially distant way out on the back deck, which was very moving. Somebody from my husband's church brought us some cinnamon bread and a roll of toilet paper, kind of as a gag gift, just to say, hey, we're thinking of you. They probably sound very small, but those gestures are very meaningful. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to share a little bit of myself. It's been quite a joy.

The Enneagram type 1 is often referred to as “the reformer” because with their strong sense of ethics and their core desire of having integrity and balance, 1s see that things can always be better--and they know how to make that happen. At their best, they can be discerning, wise, realistic, and even heroic. At their worst, they can be resentful, critical, and impatient. It’s not surprising to me that Jana has taken on reforming a rescue dog during this time. She’s taken an abused creature that was caged and ignored for two years, and has given him the gift of safety and shelter. It’s a beautiful picture of what 1s can do for our world. 

The gift that 1s can give us feels particularly important right now, when there are so many things to feel discouraged about. In this time when we need that kind of leadership and vision so much, the daily sanity we can give the 1s in our life is to reach out with small gestures like the ones that Jana mentioned, a cinnamon roll and toilet paper delivery, a communion on the front porch. A little reminder that we appreciate their efforts, and that they’re allowed to relax.

If you’re a 1 yourself, it might be that what you need most right now is to play a game. To take the dog for a walk. To have a conversation with your neighbor from your front door.