When Collaborating Gets Messy

I married my deejay and music producer. Since we said, “I do,” we’ve been traveling, working, creating, and performing together, sticking closely to our respective processes.   

Recently, an idea sent the electric feeling of a brainstorm through both of us. We talked about themes, beats, stage versus studio, rhymes, and decided to come up with a name for our duo. All of this sounded really cool and then we sat down to actually collaborate. 

He closed the door to the office and started building the music we’d use. I sat at the dining room table buried in scattered lines of poetry. He let me listen to what he was building and it wasn’t what I’d imagined the music would sound like. I read him my scattered lines and they didn’t make much sense. This quickly turned into an argument. 

My husband has a mind full of beats per minute, keys of music, sounds, bass, and instruments. I have a mind full of metaphors, story, and verse. We frustrated each other and it seemed there was nothing we could do to see each other’s opposing points of view. 

So we decided, even though it might be messy, him banging on an MPC, me scribbling random lines on paper, that if we were going to collaborate we couldn’t do it separately. I listened to the stutter and staccato process it took him to build the music. I relaxed and tried to do what writing poetry always is, listening to hear how the words want to be said. 

We stayed in that room for hours and our frustrations unraveled into a piece of poetry and music that made all the messiness worth it. 

Here are three things to consider when collaboration gets messy: 

• Pull Back The Curtains 

Reveal ideas that are unfinished, unrefined, and unedited. When people want collaboration they don’t want your perfection, they want your reality and they want you to bring that to the creative table so everyone can get their hands dirty making the idea the best it can be. 

• Control Freaks Don't Make Good Collaborators  

Collaboration and control DO NOT mix. The more I try to control, the more I miss out. Sometimes creativity is in the accepting and the letting go. When I have relaxed, used the “yes and” approach instead of the “no, that’s not MY way” approach, the ideas arrive faster and better. 

• Conflict Is Good 

Use conflict to your advantage. Don’t resort to name calling, not listening, becoming defensive or anything else we do when we feel insecure. Conflict during collaboration is not about being right or getting your point across. Dig beneath the conflict to discover how different perspectives and ways of thinking, processing, and creating, can complement each other, create a strong idea, and make that idea an even better reality. 

Inspiration and creativity are waiting to be found in the messiness of collaboration.  

How to Create a No Judgment Zone

Sometimes I get judgey. Okay a lot of the time I get judgey. When I watch people with yucky colds snot, sneeze, and clear phlegm from their throats with no sign of soap and water or hand sanitizer, I judge them. When a parent let’s their child throw a temper tantrum, sweetly calling their child’s name while the child’s yelling is ruining my ear drums, I judge them. When someone I know is in a relationship with someone who has bad character and says “but we have so much fun together” as an explanation for why they stay in the relationship, I judge them. 

I’m pretty good at judging and it always seems like a good idea, until someone judges me. Then it doesn’t seem fair for anyone to misunderstand, shame, or make assumptions about me. Judging someone else is the kind of one-way street that always arrives at a dead end. Judging doesn’t help us to understand other people and it can be a sneaky and negative way for us to attempt to feel better about ourselves by verbally or with our thoughts throwing someone else’s face into the mud. 

Many of us are familiar with school zones that require us to drive a certain amount of miles per hour, or road work zones that make us slow down and change lanes. No judgment zones work in the same way. When we take the time to suspend our judgment we slow down our criticism. We shift our perspective from condescending to understanding.  

Life is hard. Some of us are doing the best we can, getting out of bed in the morning, taking breaths, and making it through another day. Working, parenting, loving and being loved, are all things in life that take hard work. It is also takes work just to be yourself when it can seem easier to hide behind a façade or try to be a copy of someone else. 

When we create a No Judgment Zone in our lives we experience a glimpse of what God does for us. We give each other grace. We allow for each other’s wounds, mistakes, quirks, and imperfections. We remember the days that we are tired, sick, spent. The days we are short with each other and our anger gets the best of us. The days we made all the wrong choices when we had all the best intentions. 

Human beings are terrible at judging but God is great at it, because only God can see the intentions of a human being’s heart. Only God knows when we try to keep our behavior buttoned up but our hearts are running wild in the worst way.  

So the next time you are tempted to be judgey, remember how it felt the last time someone judged you. Think of how you felt on your worst day and give other people the same grace you needed. Think of the love and grace that God gives you even when you don’t deserve it. Love and grace are the best tools to create your own No Judgment Zone. 

Why You Need Friends Who Are Different From You

Recently I have had the honor of sitting at a table with a diverse group of women for the sole purpose of talking about racism, culture, privilege, and reconciliation. These words within the last year have filled social media posts and fueled worldwide trending hashtags. So a few of us gathered at a table to listen to each other’s stories, learn how these words affect us, and how can we personally and collectively heal, stand for justice, and live in peace. 

As the headlines and viral news videos tell stories of beatings, deaths, riots, and protests, it can be overwhelming to know how to not only process the information and experiences there but how to find hope and peace in the midst of everything. 

When I sit at the table with these women it doesn’t solve racism, it doesn’t change discrimination or put an end to ignorance, but as we talk and get to know each other, it changes us. As we listen to each other, look into each other’s eyes, view the beauty of each other’s various skin tones, our biases and prejudices are forced to change. Through our time at the table, we learn to really see and hear each other, to empathize with each other’s experiences, to admit what we don’t know or don’t understand, to humble ourselves. 

Ignorance, prejudice, and many societal ills in our world can begin to change through relationship. We ignore, prejudge, and assume a lot about people we don’t know or don’t understand. One of the ways we can change our own ignorance to knowledge and our prejudice to understanding is to build relationship with people who are different from us. 

If we look in our community or circle of friends and only see people who look like us, think like us, or believe like us, we do ourselves, our families and our communities a disservice. We leave ourselves vulnerable to becoming close-minded, ignorant, and unloving, online and in real life.  

Changing the world starts with being willing to change ourselves. When we begin to expand our circle of friends we will find ourselves less likely to hide behind “us and them” statements because in our friendships with people who are different from us we discover the beauty in our differences and the humanity in our similarities. 

Think of one person in your life who is different from you. Take time to get to know them and listen to their story. Don’t make friendship a science project or a checklist of action items. Be humble. Be present. Be willing to be wrong. Take the time to listen, learn, and grow from the lessons and experiences of someone else.  

Poem: First Lines

first lines never cares what time it is
they nudge their cold noses against my ear, wanting to go for walks in the briskest part of the a.m.
they don’t care that I just went to sleep
that I’m lazy
that I no longer take to the habit of keeping journals by the bed for this very moment
that I want to shoo them away
but I’m too afraid of losing one
so I drag my right hand from under the covers
grab the pen that has long since riddled my bedspread with ink blots
and let the poem do its business
so we can both head back to sleep

some days I want to quit
afraid that the words I write or maybe even my own life just will never be good enough
but thankfully words don’t give up
they are ants, crawling in a line
sending out one at a time to scout out the territory
I mean they bring reinforcements
long lines of stanzas tracing the trail from floorboards, down the doorjamb, surrounding the perimeter of my walls
will not be stomped out or stopped until they find the sweet thing they’ve been searching for

so despite the decline of printing presses
or the fact that magazines, books, and newspapers are becoming an endangered species
or that words have historically been misused and taken advantage of
they will never grow extinct
will not be rationed or relegated to government assistance
words know no economic crisis
their stimulus plan
can be found in my grandmother’s scrabble tiles
searching for triple word score
or in the hands of a little colored girl
clutching the spine of for colored girls
hoping to find the backbone to be herself
in a world that would encourage her to be anything but

so as long as God is still speaking
as long as the story must be told
as long as the words hidden in your heart will always show up on your tongue
as long as a whisper still has the power to send the hairs on the back of your neck to rise in standing ovation
words will survive

they are really just like the rest of us
searching for a place called home
with strong arms and a warm heart to hold them
hoping for someone to take them in and accept them in their present tense
for someone to believe in them, that they can be something

which is why at the end of a long day of living
and an even longer list of things to do
I leave my worries outside this room
lay next to these words and wrap my arms around them until I can feel them breathing
and sometimes we wake up in the middle of the night just to share each other’s secrets
and after we both fall asleep
the pen slips from my fingers and leaves its mark on the page

Janet Jackson, Control, and Surrender

I was a serious Janet Jackson fan growing up. I even wrote a letter to her fan club, sent her my 4th grade school picture, and told her how much Rhythm Nation meant to me. I was a special kind of nerd.

It all started with her album “Control”: Janet in the black jeans, crimped hair, large mic headset, dancing and singing. She made being brown and having hips and being soft-spoken okay. “Control” was about letting the world and herself know that she was no doormat.

I listened to that cassette and the words still ring back to me all these years later, “When I was 17, I did what people told me.” My preteen self, who understood very little about the words I was singing, gave Janet some serious competition with my bathroom mirror concerts singing the song as loudly as I could.

All these years later, I still want control. I want to ride through life, hold it by the reins and control which way it goes. Like young Janet, I had to learn that a part of life means choosing, not letting the opinions of other people override the voice of God and my own soul. I also had to learn there would be many things in life I would not be able to control.

I can’t control how long I have to stand in line and wait for things. I can’t control other people’s feelings or decisions. I can’t use my calendar, alarms, and incessant planning to command the outcome of my life. The moment I start to act like a know-it-all is when I become more aware how much I don’t know it all.

My safety net when I’m stressed is googling, planning, and worrying. I have somehow come to believe that internet searches, excessive information, and setting a timer for things is my best way to survive in life. The results of this method usually end in sleepless nights, failing health, and headaches.

I’m learning when life starts to crumble, when all the crutches I’ve trusted in start to cave in, my best course of action is surrender. In theory, the word surrender brings images to my mind of Psalm 23, still waters, bubbling brooks. In actuality, surrender makes me think I’m supposed to do nothing about the looming problem that stands in the way between me and a good night’s sleep.

Surrender is an easy word to say but it’s a lot harder to do. Surrendering means I really do trust God to know and do what’s best for me, more than I trust what I think I know or understand. As much as I want to hold onto things or people or ideas or plans, I have to make sure I put my trust in the One who made the people, who gives the ideas, who conceives all the plans.

Surrendering is not a one-time experience. It is something I must do, every day, moment by moment. When I feel my want for control itching in my fingers as I type my latest concern, problem or stress into Google’s convenient search engine box, I remember that sometimes life is about doing but sometimes life is also about resting.

Not just the kind of rest we get when we sleep, but a rest we need in our souls, especially when we take all of the problems of life and carry them on our shoulders as if we have the strength to carry it all. There is only One who carried it all, whose shoulders are strong enough for any problem, disease, concern, worry, wound or frustration. His shoulders are big enough to carry today and eternity. God is the one who is truly in control.