The Journey Continues

For those of you who read my last post, you may have gathered that I've been feeling particularily introspective these days. I've always been a bit of a thinker and as Holly might tell you, a bit sensitive. Traveling has seemed to amplify this introspection for me. At first this website The Real McQuays and our email was just a play on words from The Real McCoy; however, after writing my last post... the name has taken on a double meaning for me. This is an opportuniy to share the Real McQuays. Whether or not anyone is reading along, there is something liberating about being authentic and open and sharing what's going on. Of course there is something intimidating about doing it on such a public medium, but then again, I suppose that's part of the reason it feels liberating. For me, this movement towards being more open and authentic started from an exercise that I took part in several months ago. Let me take you back...

The Soul and The Ego

Several months ago, my sister and Holly were working together to develop an interactive, experiential workshop to help develop and foster productive conflict management skills. They were putting on a small beta workshop in Victoria and obviously, as the supportive brother and husband I am, I attended. The workshop was, in many ways, just like any workshop I'd been to. It had a slide deck, workbooks, markers, name tags, snacks and coffee. The point of this beta workshop was to allow my sister and Holly to gather feedback around the experiential exercises that they were developing. It was a two day workshop and an exercise that we did on the second day has forever altered the lens through which I view myself and the people around me.

The exercise required that particpants arrange themselves in groups of 3 with the only requirement being that you did not know any of the people in your group. So here I am, sitting at this round conference room table, white tablecloth with markers and sticky notes scattered across, with my stapled work book turned to the appropriate page. I'm sitting at this table with two other people whom I had never met. Then came the instructions:

"You will spend the next 5 minutes jotting down in your workbook what you feel your soul needs and what your ego wants"

Ok, I can do that... I think. At first, the vagueness of soul and ego were challenging. I felt like a rock climber, feeling my way around some featureless structure, looking for a hold. Eventually, my mind began to zero in on the differences and I began to jot. With our bullet points jotted,

"You will now read what your wrote for your soul and your ego to the other people at your table"

Ok, simple. We all started reading all of the things that our souls needed. These we easy. They were all of the noble things that made us all feel good and proud. Some of my soul's needs were:

• I love to teach
• I love to learn
• I want to make a difference in the world

Like I said. These were easy for all of us to read. But when it came to the ego. Something interesting happened. All of us, who were just previously so eager to share, were now finding every way we could to not read what we wrote. Talking circles around the words on our pages. Finally, I just decided to do it. I prefaced it with how I wasn't sure why, but I felt ashamed and embarassed of the things that my ego wanted, but I was just going to share them anyways. Here are some of the things my ego wanted:

• To be seen as brilliant
• To be known for doing or building something amazing

At the time, and still actually, it's kind of embarassing to share. They just seem so vain. But an interesting thing happened once I did it. By holding this piece of myself out there and observing it objectively, I felt as though I could distance myself from it. I felt as though I could separate the person that I am from these parts that I wasn't entirely proud of. Though I don't have the utmost control of this vanity driven part of my psyche, I was now able to hold it out there as a separate entity and move past it. It was so simple, but has left me feeling so much more free ever since. Sure, I get envious of friends buying houses and joining start-ups. I get self conscious that I'm making the wrong decisions and that I will look foolish. But that's just the ego, and for some reason it feels good to share it.

Ok. Anecdote finished. Sharing and being authentic is liberating, so here we are.

Finding One's Self

I'm definitely not going to claim that I'm a traveler. Though I'm traveling right now and have been with my wife for the past 31 days. I don't know at what point I would feel comfortable categorizing myself as a traveler. I suppose I feel self conscious about my lack of experience.

I'm not going to claim to know the best way to pack a backpack (though I do feel as though I might be converging on one). I'm not fluent in anything and still get quite overwhelmed by language. I think it's actually my ego that holds me back with language as I have this general concern about looking foolish. As soon as a response is given, by brain seems to shut off as the idea of not being able to understand what is about to be said kind of paralizes me.

So far we've travelled to some of the safest countries in the world, where vast numbers of people speak English. We've used things like Uber to get around which has been awesome, but also removes an entire domain of communication from the traveling experience. Though I don't yet feel like I'm a traveler, the value of this journey for me and the impact it seems to be having on my relationship with my wife and my friends is luckily not contingent on my level of traveling experience.

Holly and I have always shared an abundance of common ground throughout our relationship. We're both nerds 🤓 (I studied Electrical Engineer, she studied Computer Science), we both have an affinity for order and routines and we are both generally risk adverse. So traveling was a natural choice...right? I am starting to see why people say that you find yourself when you travel. Traveling seems to have a way of finding the buttons of an individual (or couple) and mashing them and yet, at the same time, providing the space to reflect on these experiences. With so much waiting, and queuing, and walking, and flying, and training and bussing, one can't help but think about those moments. However, with so many new things coming at you at every turn there is also no space to dwell. Sure, we waited too long to book our tickets from Cordoba to Barcelona and now we have to pay way more to get there. But the mantra that we've been using lately (from Maya Angelou courtesy of Oprah via a podcast):

"When you know better you do better."

Despite our similarities and common ground, I'm starting to learn more precisely the differences between Holly and myself. It's amazing that you can be with someone for so long and still have so much to learn about them and yourself. What I've been reflecting on and converging on lately is specifically our strengths and weaknesses and the points at which we each start to unwravel.

We were recently visiting the Azores islands and one morning the SIM card in our phone stopped working. Up to this point, we've been using maps on the phone a lot, so this obviously wasn't ideal but also not the end of the world. I figured we could cruise into town and find a paper map and use that for the day until we got back home and figured out our phone (turns out our credit cards were blocked). Anyways, we headed out and stopped at a gas station to see if they either had SIM cards or a paper map. No dice on either. Darn. At this point, I looked over and could see that Holly was starting to unwravel. However, she held onto it and kept it together as we continued into town. We stopped at the tourist info to pick up a map and inquire about a phone store. We left and walked just around the block to the aforementioned phone store. We stepped inside and were greeted by some sales woman. Within a few minutes, Holly with saleswoman in tow were looking at me to see if I approved of the purchase of this SIM card. I hated it and felt myself begin to unwravel. While Holly and the woman finished the transaction, I stood there and observed myself as I was the feeling of frustration or something similar washed over me.

Why was I feeling like this?

Luckily, like Holly at the gas station earlier that morning, I was able to duck under the wave of emotion bearing down on me. Like Holly, I was able to bring it back and we left the store with a working phone and a list of activities to go do. We spent the whole day doing a lot of great things and it wasn't until later that night when we were having dinner that I brought it up.

What happened to us this morning?

It's not like any of the things that happened were serious in the slightest, but for some reason, in the span of two hours we each had moments where we started to unwravel. What I realized is that though Holly and I are both very particular, we are very particular in quite different ways. Holly is always making, organizing, scheduling and maintaining many lists in her head. She can't help it. It's what she does. Cognitively, Holly often finds herself very deep in the realm of the time, schedule and dependency of events and tasks. She is very particular about things that need to be done and when they are done. When wrenches find their way into these plans, it forces her to recalculate and recalibrate all of her lists and therefore she starts to unwravel. I, on the other hand, am terrible with dates and times. It's not that I can't schedule things, I can, but my mind doesn't think of life as a series of events with dates and times (even though it is). I think of life as a series of problems that need to be solved usually in a particular order. In my world, my goal is to find solutions to these problems that are of both the highest quality and efficiency that I can manage. Holly can attest, that I spend a majority of my idle time thinking about and visualizing various ways to optimize and tweak the dials. Looking at inefficiencies and trying to devise solutions to eliminate or lessen their impact. This ability makes me an excellent Software Developer but not the greatest at managing the priorities of a product or project as a whole. So knowing this, back to the question:

What happened to us on this morning?

Well. The phone stopped working, and immediately Holly's brain when into recalculation mode. When the first stop at the gas station proved to be unfruitful, she needed to go deeper into her scheduled lists, pushing back our day's plans and potentially bumping others from our finite timeline. When we got to the phone store, here we are, solving our problem with the solution provided by the salewoman, which is likely not optimal. I didn't even get a chance to see if there was another phone shop!

I know, looking back at it now, it's ridiculous.

Colter. Holly. Let it go!

And we did. In these moments, we were both able to let go of whatever was going on with ourselves and just roll with it.

In the end, it's through these innocuous and inconsequential events that I've learned about myself and about my Holly. I can look back through our history and pick out so many places where I've tossed wrenches into her scheduled lists. I can see moments where an impulsive decision or two has driven me crazy. I can also see how each of our strengths cover the other's weakness. It's a weird and beautiful thing to learn to see something that you feel like you should've known all along. Seems so fitting that during this time of reflection we would walk under a poem suspended above the street.

Spend the day with yourself, Let nothing distract you, A poem emerges so young and so old you can't know how long it has lived in you

They say that people go traveling to find themselves. Obviously I need to do more research, but the preliminary results would conclude that I agree.