The Four Commitments | Part 6: The Power of Intentionally Committing to Something New
Andrew Solomon, in searching for meaning in his own story, wrote a heck of a book, “Far From the Tree.” In it, he studied various ways that children differed significantly from their parents. His title cleverly plays on the old adage, “The apple doesn’t fall from the tree,” and Solomon’s work looks at what happens when it does.
He studied lots of examples, including ones related to disability. There are more than a few good insights, and a few passages I would take issue with, but by and large, he offers that people had good lives if their parents found meaning in their child’s story.
Parents who learned to integrate the difference of their child’s life from their own not only found ways to help their children live good lives, but also lived good lives themselves.
Parents who resented the way their children showed up in the world experienced a lot of trouble, both for their children and for themselves.
This is broad-brushing the book, of course, but it was one of the author’s primary insights after years of intense listening to the stories of countless people with disabilities and their families.
And it rhymes with what we’ve learned at Starfire, which, in essence, comes down to people finding common cause with each other.
When we started playing around with our new ideas, what emerged were these really cool community projects. They invited people into crossing over the barriers of their difference and working together to bring some new life to the world.
They were making meaning together, despite, and oftentimes, because of, their differences. This had a bonding effect. They saw each other as more alike, beyond the superficialities of demographics. They were alike as human beings, sharing the spirit of creating a better world.
That’s what we invited families into and wondered if they might learn a similar lesson: That their children are simply co-humans who they happen to be related to. And what can co-humans do together? Almost anything they imagine.
We’ve had a front row seat for how people have answered that question in beautiful ways for over a decade. But it still feels countercultural, so it still needs serious intention and commitment if we’re going to get there.
Making these commitments asked families to give up a lot. They had to think and act and relate in new ways.
Asking them to give up the certainty of what the world told them about “disability” wasn’t easy, but when they did it, they found so many good surprises.
Carol shared that “we are no longer ‘the family with a kid with a disability.’ We are ‘the family that does cool stuff.” And that new identity included her son in it. What a powerful shift for them all.
One mother discovered a neighborhood book club that she’d never known about. Whether she was intentionally left out, or just so isolated, doing her project helped her grow her connections, and she ended up with a new set of connections with her neighbors.
Another family found that their project inspired their neighbors to reciprocate, and their social calendar started to fill up with parties and invitations….even during the pandemic!
All of this goodness, and so much more, came as a result of the families who committed to trying another way. That’s the power of intentional commitments.
But it’s tricky making a commitment. It feels high stakes.
One way we learned to lower the risk was to make the commitments small and temporary.
The truth of the matter is that our commitments often are in conflict with each other.
Each of us wants safety and security and stability in our life. Each of us also want growth, new experiences and some level of adventure. We call these “competing commitments,” and there is a power in naming them that way. We can hold them both together. We don’t have to relinquish one for another forever.
We can decide to go for safety one day, and take a risk the next. Or we can lean toward stability in one aspect of our life, but take some risks in another.
Our “Four Commitments” compete with legitimate and important other commitments, which is why we limited how we apply them. We only asked them to do it for this short time and only for the project they were working on.
The reality is that families do need services. But services don’t bring community.
And families can garner some support from disability-centered programming. But we know their child has many other aspects of their identity and giftedness to offer the world.
The Four Commitments helped families focus on new social connections and new stories, while they still maintained the supports of more traditional services. They could step into new mindsets about their children, themselves and their neighbors while still navigating the culture around them that isn’t quite where we need it to be yet.
Families had some space to explore something new by committing to it for a short time, in a limited fashion.
That gave them creative freedom to design their own unique project, including their own unique network of people, discovering their own meaning in their own story in their own way.
Starfire staff had been launching creative community projects for five years before we invited families to lead their own project. When our staff did it, we could meet on a regular basis and tell them how to do the work. They were employees, after all. That’s one form of power.
But we didn’t have that kind of control over families, nor did we want it. So we developed the Four Commitments as a way to give the families some guardrails for their efforts, should they choose to adopt them. For every family that said “yes” to committing to a project, there were at least as many that said “no,” which was fine. Commitments are chosen, after all.
In looking back, though, we came to see that the Four Commitments weren’t just for families. They had emerged through our staff’s early efforts and grew into our organizational culture. We had just never named them!
We’ve since found them to be helpful in all our efforts to innovate around inclusion, carving out a space for new kinds of action and energy. Once that space is clear, it can be filled with the goodness of a family and community.
Focus on gifts.
Build something that is uniquely yours.
Find the free connections that community offers.
Look for joy.
See where it goes.
Photo by Priscilla Gyamfi on Unsplash