Anticipate

There is a favorite story in my family: when I was 5 years old my mom took me to my first ever ballet class. She just knew she could slap a cute little pink tutu on her little girl and a sugar plum fairy would emerge. Not so much. I cried the whole time and to this day I have vivid images of approaching the house where the lessons were held in downtown Hatfield, PA, walking into the room with the mirrors and the bar and absolutely hating it. Unbeknownst to my mother a few weeks later my dad took me out on a Saturday morning and signed me up for soccer. I’ve been playing ever since.

When I was ten, I made the Allstar team. It was a big deal not only because it was the Allstars but also because I was the only girl who made it on the team. I remember being chuffed and terrified. I also remember my coach, Mr. Albrecht. If you’ve played sports, you know you always remember your really good and really terrible coaches. Mr. Albrecht was a great coach and I can still see him running down the sidelines and shouting “Anticipate. You have to anticipate.” He was tall, a little bit chubby and I remember that he kinda spit it out when he was saying it. At the time, I thought that it was a pretty cool word and so I tried really hard to understand it. I had to think about where the ball is going before it got there. A fairly complex concept for a 10 year old. Very cool indeed.

I’m not entirely sure if I carried the concept of anticipation with my soccer playing throughout the years. I tried, but mostly I realized that I could run faster than everyone else and my speed was at the center of my attack. I’m fairly certain, however, that I’ve applied “anticipate” to a lot of other elements of my life. Thinking ahead and considering scenarios before they happen are definitely a part of my decision-making process. Maybe too much so, as now my anticipation can sometimes more resemble anxiety, the all too prominent emotion in my daily reality.

But I also wonder, more hopefully, if it also helped shape me into becoming an empathetic person. Empathy is not only my favorite emotion, but also my favorite technical expertise. It has helped me work in Africa, where technical skills must be mixed with compassion in order to have any meaningful impact. Patience is important there too, so obviously I wasn’t always a perfect fit for the continent. Empathy has also been my key for hosting countless brave souls from around the world in the US. This is something a lot of people think they can do, but ever since the Empowering Hands Girls went on hunger strike in New York City (not under my supervision) I realize that it takes tremendous skill and deep understanding of the perspective from which these friends have come in order to host them safely and successfully stateside.

I understood this very early on in my career. My first experience of this was in 1997 when I frequently hosted Martin O’Brien from the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), the leading human rights organization based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was looking for support in the US for CAJ’s work during “the talks” to negotiate the Good Friday Agreement. While the Irish American community in New York was CAJ’s obvious constituency, Martin was freaked out by them. Irish-Americans from New York can be very alien to an actual Irish person. I discovered this when I spent the previous summer waiting tables at Pasta Presto in Dublin. Once I figured out the question “so are you an Irish American?,” was thinly veiled with mockery, I relished the opportunity to say no and state that had no interest in proudly proclaiming Irish heritage. (I was just interested in finding Bono and drinking Guinness.)

I found that saying things to Martin like, “yes, I know they think they’re more Irish than you, but you have to remember that they really do think they are as Irish as you actually are. You can use it to your advantage, because for them meeting an actual Irish person and supporting the cause for Irish peace would be an extraordinary feather in their cap of Irishness.” He went with it.

I wonder if the origins of worry and empathy come from those moments on the soccer field during the Allstar game, with Mr. Albrecht shouting “anticipate” on the sidelines and me running circles around the boys and, of course, scoring the goooooooooooooallllllllllll!!!!!!!