Digesting PAB

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For the 53 hours since PAB ended, I’ve been squeezing my brain, hoping to shrink the PAB2011 experience down to a blog-post-sized blurb.

My mind, my chest, my eyes are still swelling with swirling ideas and images. Huge laughs, huge smiles, huge buzzing, tingling emotions. Huge gratitude for the privilege of belonging.

This morning, as we attended Lucy’s grade 6 graduation, I realized that the stilted, tension-filled ickiness of that sweltering gym, thick with twelve years of inter-parental encounters, was the anti-PAB. And that helped boil the weekend down to its core…

PAB gets me. It lets me be me when I’m there. And seems to do the same for us all.
PAB’s about expressing, not impressing.
It’s about connecting and creating and stretching and sharing.

It’s a slingshot into life.

Thanks to everybody for the photos (and for the weekend, of course).

More PAB here.
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About Andrea

Andrea Ross was diagnosed with breast cancer October 6, 2009 and intends to survive and thrive. You can read more from Andrea here.

  • Scarborough Dude

    I’m loving following your post-PAB thoughts and emotions Andrea – it helps a lot. There really is such a wonderful feeling about it all that it sometimes seems unreal- at least until we find others feel the same way. Thanks for sharing! Hugs!!

  • Andy

    Viv and I have been thinking about this too and I like what you said “PAB’s about expressing not impressing”. There were no egos to contend with. There was no one hawking a book they’ve just written. There was no one telling me I HAD to do anything or that I was doing anything wrong. It was just “us” hanging and telling our stories to each other the way we wanted to tell them. It felt like sitting in anyone’s living room and just chilling.

  • Mare

    yesterday i was struggling with my “post PAB comedown” and recalled that i had the same experience/feeling post-PAB2010. It’s great to spend the weekend with creative, wonderful people exchanging ideas, and getting inspired, but then to come home and to have to hit reality. The upside is it *does* inspire me to do something different, new, better each year, so that’s the good thing. I just wish every day were like PAB. I started a tumblr blog called PABeveryday where I’ll create and post 1 new thing each day until 9/21/11.

  • +1 Andrea. The PAB tribe is incredible. I too have been slowly digesting the many insights and ideas I absorbed over the weekend. I think PAB is an antidote to the “stilted, tension-filled ickiness” we all encounter daily. I appreciate the time and effort put into to making PAB happen and the community who comes together to participate with genuine honesty.

  • More than any previous year, I have so many ideas now to sort through. I took more notes than usual in an attempt to lay it all out, in a year when I had planned to take no notes. It was a rare treat to sit and absorb it all during the sessions, and while I may have been fairly quiet my brain was working overtime!nnI love the generous, open spirit of this community. It is what I try to help my other communities achieve.

  • Janice

    All that AND I have PAB to thank for finding you.

  • Hey ya! Thank you PAB!!n

  • I love that PABeveryday idea, Mare. Wondering the significance of the end date 9/21/11…

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