A Good Story

“You can play the game, you can act your part – I know it isn’t easy to do.” James Taylor

“Who is playing out this drama? Who decides if it is a comedy or a tragedy?” Carlos Lopez

“It’s not just something I made up – It’s something I know. It’s something I read.” (Overheard in passing, as I was thinking about this piece)

My mom, when she heard somebody acknowledge that they weren’t really sure that they were remembering something accurately, liked to say, “Well, it makes a good story, anyway.” And it was clear that she considered a “good story” to be every bit as important as the literal truth – maybe even more so. (This may have partially been the Irish in her.)

What makes a good story? Is it drama? A happy ending? Good laughs?

What is the punch line of the story, the final act, the curtain coming down?

It’s clear that there are stories within stories – including shorter, self-contained segments within our life stories. Some stories chronicle many generations – and show the linkages among several successive life stories. Or a really good storyteller (novelist, film-maker, even sometimes a historian or biographer) can weave together many stories simultaneously – even those that are geographically, demographically and/or socioeconomically very separate.

So who decides what chunk of a person’s life makes up a separate story? Who sees the linkages among two or more life stories? Whether the decider or seer is a protagonist in the story or an outside storyteller, it’s clear that there is lots of room for subjectivity in creating most any story.

So it’s subjective – so what? What’s the difference? Maybe lots.

If I tell myself a story in which I am a victim, I may succumb to helplessness – or fight back. These situations can lead to paranoia – and/or domestic tragedies. (A few days ago in our area, a jealous husband killed the 18-year-old student with whom his 30-year-old wife/teacher was sleeping. This husband, as contrasted to the ever more common legal action against teachers, picked the kid as the villain in this story.)

So who/what/how determines a “true story”?

• The guy I quoted at the beginning of this piece believes that the story must be true because he read it somewhere. Others might put faith in what they hear on the TV or radio news.
  
• Most of us tend to pick and choose our sources – some will give more credence to the New York Times, others to Fox TV.
  
• Most of us tend to believe the stories we tell ourselves.

I really like a bumper sticker I’ve been seeing around town that says, “You don’t have to believe everything you think.” For me this gets to the heart of the story I am creating now as I write this. In the story I’m telling myself, right here and now (though I have thought these same thoughts many times in the past), there is tremendous subjectivity in the stories we tell, see, believe – even in the ones we tell about ourselves about our own lives. Maybe these especially.

So what? What if we concede this subjectivity in our own stories about ourselves? And not everybody will concede this about his or her own story. This area, the stories we tell ourselves – and sometimes others – about our own lives, are often the stories we will most resolutely defend.

In another post, I quote Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen master, as encouraging people to ask themselves, “Am I sure?” That previous post refers to which perceptions are accurate in the here and now. But the same principle can be applied to our stories. Am I sure about the veracity of this story?

As I described in that piece about here-and-now accuracy, holding on to certainty about our stories tends to create tension and rigidity. We fight to defend our version of the story. This can lead to shooting 18 year old kids, or even to full-scale wars.

But what is the advantage of staying looser with our stories?

• We make ourselves less defensive, less tense – more open.
  
• We need less distance from others. We don’t compete for whose story is more accurate, but see a bigger story that contains all these sub-stories. It then becomes not my story vs. your story, but “our story”, which contains all our various versions of the truth.
  
• If we accept that we are always, at every moment, making up stories – which may hold some specific accuracies, but never manage to include all important elements of the truth, including the stories of the other characters in our story – this gives us a lot of room to get more creative with the stories we tell.

A story that I am telling myself these days is that any time I make myself the hero of my story (or any of my sub-stories) – or even make myself causal, even the protagonist – I am missing the boat. If I were to trace the antecedents of this story fully enough, I would find that my current behavior has been shaped by so many previous scenarios, so many other people, that it is in no way separate at all – I am in no way separate at all.

Some would say that this perspective is limiting, that it keeps us from being proactive, from acting heroically. I would say that when we are telling ourselves a story in which we are the hero, it is just as subjective as when we tell a story where we are the victim.

It seems to me that the only even-close-to-accurate story is the story of the human race, imbedded in the much bigger story of the planet earth, within the even bigger story of the universe. I tend to call this big, big story, “life”. We sit within a bigger context – life. We are not truly causal, but life is. Or maybe (and I am definitely leaning more and more this way), causal stories are just one genre of story. Maybe the whole notion of one thing causing another is simply one way of looking at things.

Yeah, the story I’m most liking these days is one where nothing is separate from anything else, which leaves no “things” - and no “thing” to cause any other thing. Some quantum physicists these days are telling similar stories, but they may be equally locked into the particular lens they are looking through. I am seeing quantum physics and mechanistic physics as not in competition with each other, but as part of a still larger story – in which neither camp is “right” or “wrong”.

Because “right and wrong” is just one more kind of story.

Why?

“Why” is a lie. “Why” lives in the world of mechanics, of cause and effect, of billiard balls bouncing endlessly off each other. The true nature of reality is much more quantum than that - more holistic, more interconnected, more holographic.

Every bit of our behavior is an outgrowth of everything that has gone before. It is our path – every bit of it. Ours uniquely, as no other. And it all hangs together – it fits together as our own little jigsaw puzzle, or a rare vase that has fallen and shattered, and which we spend our lives piecing back together.

Courses on “Interviewing Skills” teach people to not use the “Why?” question, because it makes people defensive. These courses might say that people get defensive because this question pries into their motivations, their inner states. That’s all true, but there’s more: the question “Why?” has no valid answer. We might not be able to verbalize this truth, but some part of us knows it.

When we try to answer the “Why?” question, we just go back and make up a story. The story might be interesting – it might even disclose some meaningful information about us. But it doesn’t answer the question.

We might get into ballpark answers if we said things like:

- Because I’m me, having had all the experiences I have had in this life.

- Because, in that particular moment in time, that was all I could possibly have done.

- I have no real answer for why I did it. I can glimpse pieces of what was going on in me just before I did it, but I don’t know how those pieces got there. It’s all way too big, too complex for me. And it will make me crazy trying to figure it out. So I’ll let it go. It was what it was, this moment is as it is – and the next moment will be exactly what it will be. And it will surprise me.

Waiting for a “Yes”

Aliyah, one of my favorite Jubilee poets, performed a piece this morning (jamming with this two-time Grammy winner on acoustic base – very exciting) with no title (Aliyah doesn’t do titles), but loosely about her recently-developed process of waiting to act until she gets a clear Yes about a particular course of action. Obviously, she is not totally consistent about this. I bet she doesn’t apply it to brushing her teeth, crossing the street – or even many activities where it might actually be more appropriate or useful. But I liked the idea of it. It’s actually not a new idea – my friend Monty has spoken and written eloquently and persuasively about the ways he applies this principle. But it was good to be reminded of it.

Sitting outside in the sun just now, smoking a cigarette, across the street from a coffee shop where some friends were gathered – a couple of them expecting me – I just could find no “Yes” in me about going into the coffee shop. So I sat there in the sun, at first judging myself for this lack of action. I actually was feeling somewhat shy and awkward this morning, so I started (so drably predictable) by criticizing myself. But the self-criticism dropped away with relative ease, as I let myself rather just pay attention to the uncomfortable feelings. Then I got a very distinct “Yes” about capturing this moment in writing. I spent about 15 minutes getting this down on paper, really kinda having fun, considering the squeamishness of the topic.

Then I got a “Yes” for going into the coffee shop – not a totally enthusiastic Yes, but a Yes nonetheless. I was moving slow. I got my coffee, then didn’t sit down right away. There were about eight folks, all of whom I knew, around a fairly big circle – and I didn’t sit down right away. I didn’t know really where I wanted to sit – what spot called to me – and I waited, again, for a Yes. I finally got one and sat down between Jeff and Richard.

Then I had some great little eye contact and non-verbal greetings with Robin, with whom I feel lots more connection (based on actually very few words ever exchanged, much more on eye contact, smiles, and occasional hugs). And it was totally spontaneous and enthusiastic for me to go around the table and sit just behind her (no room around this side of the table).

Then a few minutes later, Robin left, leaving me maybe ten feet outside the circle – with now a clear open spot, Robin’s spot. I checked inside myself about moving up. I wasn’t really asking myself, “Do I want to move up?” I was much more scanning my insides for some attraction, some leaning towards moving up. I could find none, so I sat where I was. Not particularly gregarious, that – but I still was not feeling gregarious. Not really so shy and awkward, after my writing outside (ah, the miracle of surrendering to the muse), but also not gregarious.

I also recognized that I was not the least bit interested in the conversation and was more enjoying simply listening to all the interesting sounds in the café. Then I got the impulse to write something down – about this very process of waiting for a Yes. I had a really nice little notebook, which I had just used outside, in my backpack on the other side of the table. Shall I go get it? Nothing in myself that I could identify wanted to get up and go over there. I did want the notebook – if I could have somehow teleported it from my pack to my hands, I would have done so. But I didn’t want it enough to go around the table for it. And, choosing to not get it, I breathed a little sigh of relief. Some part of my mind and/or body was grateful that I had simply stood my ground (or sat it, I guess). Then I pulled out a business card and filled the entire back side (and all the white space on the front) with a fun little note about Yes’s. Not a napkin (of which there were none on the table), but just about as cool.

Am I going to spend the rest of my life waiting for Yes’s before I act? Hardly. The whole notion mostly went out of my head in the two hours since then, emerging just a few minutes ago. Sometimes my Yes will not come from that actual word, but from observing what my body is pulled towards or literally from watching where my feet lead me. Sometimes I will learn as much from good, clear No’s. No’s seem (and I guess are) more negative than Yes’s, but I think just as important. Our Yes’s get their power and integrity from the clarity of our No’s.

Do I have more to write about this topic right now? I’m not getting a “Yes”. Do I want to stop now? A clear “Yes”. Bye.

Non-resistance

This morning I was waiting in line outside a government office that opens at 9 a.m. The handful of other people who were also standing there at 8:30 a.m. probably knew, as did I, that this was the way to get at the head of the line, which can grow exponentially by 9 o’clock.

The 50ish guy in front of me seemed harmless. In his good old boy southern accent, he turned to me and the folks behind me and commented on how a few more warm days like this one in early March and the still-brown grass would “come on like crazy”. Talking about the oncoming spring felt very comfortable to me.

Then, from some connection known only to the speaker, he shifted to how much colder the winters used to be, how he had to walk through the snow to get to school because “they didn’t cancel school like they do today”. Pretty classic – almost archetypal – stuff about “When I was a kid” (“When I was your age”, etc.). I started then to only half-listen, because these stories can get a bit tedious.

Then another shift in the trajectory of this guy’s (so far unencouraged) soliloquy, which I had not predicted: “They used to give us whippin’s, too. If you got out of line, that paddle came out. Nowadays, if you even look at ‘em wrong, they sue you…. And then they wonder why kids come into school shooting people.” I felt the tension start to build in my body.

“They believed in the Ten Commandments back then. Now they’re getting rid of those, too.”

“Now that’s the real problem.” This last had obviously hit a nerve for the 70ish lady behind me. Now I was no longer just face-to-face with this guy who held beliefs very different from my own – and who, as he warmed to the task, was expressing them with a growing level of belligerency. Now I was trapped in the middle of some reactionary call-and-response, with no place to go unless I wanted to give up my place in the line.

Before things “got all pear-shaped” (I loved that expression from a Brit colleague I had worked with a few years before, to describe a situation that had suddenly become problematic), I had been feeling kind of nice and relaxed, if maybe not fully awake yet - no time for coffee before heading to this office.

I had even, as I stood in line, been practicing the “body awareness” exercise I describe in another post. Noticing my breathing and the various sensations in my body, I had even been a little bit peaceful.

But not now. The hairs were standing up on the back of my neck. I had an impulse to say something, to not let all this oppressive (by my standards) shit just sit. “Speak up for yourself.” I was right in the middle – in the middle – of the kind of attitudes that I hate about living in the South.

Then I heard a little whisper from somewhere in me, just ever-so-lightly inserting itself whenever my angry protestations took a moment to breathe:

“What if you didn’t resist this?”

I knew immediately to what this inner voice was referring. It was reminding me of a principle in which I deeply believe and occasionally even practice – if not at all in this particular moment.

What if I were to remember – and even feel in my body – that nothing was going wrong here? What if I did not shift from peace to alarm bells, based simply on some stuff people said – which was not in any way aimed at me, but I just happened to be standing in the middle of? Sure, getting accidentally in the middle of a drive-by shooting would be very bad – but these were words, for Pete’s sake. Maybe kind of angry, negative words. Maybe words with which I strongly disagree, but still just words.

I started in that last sentence to say, “with which I violently disagree”. Ah, here is a lead for me; here is something I can work with. The problem here was really not in any of the words I was hearing, but rather some violence within me – the part of me that feels it needs to “fight back”.

What if I did not need to fight back?

What if I reassured myself that, in the here and now, no one was in any danger? There weren’t any kids about to be paddled, etc.

There was no way for me to change anybody’s mind – and really no need to. In this moment, it really did not make any difference what these people thought and believed.


There are so many stimuli around me that I have the impulse to resist. A little later in the morning, I saw a guy walk by who was way overweight. Something in me tensed up from just watching him. I didn’t want to be seeing this. But why? I’m not him, carrying around all that extra weight. I have no idea what it is like for him to be so heavy – for all I know, it does not bother him at all. But it bothered me.

How many other things do I see, hear, read, etc., in the course of a day that lead me to tighten inside? I started in that sentence to say, “make me tighten”. But these stimuli obviously don’t make me tighten – they don’t make me do anything. It’s me that does it.

I think it’s safe to say that at least some of my tightness is an expression of disapproval. I don’t approve of what these people say, of how heavy that guy is, etc. But whether I approve or not is certainly not going to make any difference in what I see, now is it? My approval or lack of it has no impact on anything in the outside world, unless I feel compelled to mess with it – which will almost certainly just create more mess. No, my disapproval affects nothing out there – only in here. I get tense when I disapprove of some part of my world. I may get irritated, self-righteous, angry, defensive – all manner of lesser or greater discomfort. I make myself unhappy.

It obviously doesn’t have to go that way. It would be totally possible to remind myself of something else I deeply believe, no matter how often I forget it: nothing is going wrong. It is all as it is meant to be. There is a wisdom operating here that’s a lot smarter than my little mind. I don’t have to be the traffic cop or babysitter for how other people, think, feel, or speak. I don’t need in any way to get in the middle of how much or badly they eat, whether they work out, etc., etc., etc.

No, if I let go of patrolling the rest of the world, but just walk my own beat, that’s really plenty to keep my hands full. And, when I’m lucky, I will apply some of these same insights to what I see, hear, feel inside of me. I don’t have to disapprove of any of it, try to change it – I don’t have to go on alarm at all. Trying to mess with what I find in myself will most likely be as little effective as if I had waded into the reactionary deep water on line in front of that office this morning.

I’ve really got better things to do, like noticing my breathing.

What am I going to do next?

Life is more and more having its way with me.

I’m sitting at the 11:15 Jubilee Sunday service (roughly 300 folks at each of the two services), wondering what I’m going to do when it’s over. Across the big room, I see a couple of guys with whom I sometimes go for coffee. Will I again go out with them? I don’t know – part of me wants to and part not. Why not? I’m not sure, it’s just so.

But more true still is that I really have no idea what I’m going to do next. I can make myself anxious by trying, now, to figure it out. I can make myself tense and tight by, in this moment, deciding a path and determining to make it happen. In this way, I can cut myself off from whatever feelings, impulses and aversions might bubble up in me between now and the end of the service. Making decisions is way over-rated.

It feels soothing, in this moment, to remind myself that I don’t know, in this moment, which path will nurture my spirit more. More even than that, I really, really don’t know what I will do. To tell myself that I do know is just a useless conceit.

How will I know? I will really know only when that after-service moment arrives. I will know only when I see – just see – where, in that moment, my feet take me.

A few weeks ago, a good friend came up to me during the noisy exchange-the-peace part of the service and asked me what I was doing afterwards. It was really kind of thrilling to announce out loud – and to have it witnessed by a close friend – that I just didn’t know. I literally told her that I wouldn’t know until I see where my feet take me. Geez, it was fun to say that!

She seemed a little surprised. I imagine she was in that little bubble of thinking that we choose these things. I was in a different bubble – or maybe out of the bubble – where choice is not as important as consciously surrendering to life, and knowing that it will have its way with me whether I like it or not.

Two hands

Two hands

I’ve been breaking things lately. Breaking and dropping things. Breaking and dropping and spilling things. And, for every actual breakage/droppage/spillage, I have had two or three or four close calls.

How I have been making this mess, more specifically, is that I have been setting cups, glasses and other containers too close to the edge of the surface where I am putting them. Actually too much hanging over the edge. And there have been lots more instances, when I go to retrieve an item, where I discover that it, also, is hanging precariously over the edge.

Now, why/how do I do this? Am I a daredevil who likes to beat the odds or trod just as close to a potential accident as possible? Are these surfaces so crapped out that there is no room for these additional objects? (There actually is some truth in this one, but I don’t think it is the primary factor here.)

No, there is another factor that runs through most of these little mishaps (not all of them little, as when, the other day, I dropped my favorite ceramic coffee mug into the porcelain sink). In each case, I was trying to do two things at once. Or actually I stopped paying attention to the first task (placing the container on a surface) before it was completed, in order to move on to another. Literally, in each of the instances that I have recently tracked, I had shifted my head and body orientation in a different direction before the item had settled onto its new resting place. I had not stuck around to actually see the container get successfully placed where I had aimed it. Rather, some part of me had put that task on automatic pilot, trusting that it could finish getting done without any focused attention on my part. And, clearly, in each of these cases, my unconscious strategy proved wrong.

Some mindfulness teachers (Zen Buddhists, etc.) suggest that you use two hands for tasks like these – even if, literally, only one hand is required. This physically prevents you from beginning another task before this one is done. Or any physical task, at any rate – you could still be, in your mind, writing a letter or planning your day. Using two hands, especially as you grow familiar, could still allow for you to do two things at once. But it’s not as easy.

The mindfulness teachers regard this two-hands exercise as a little meditation – a reminder and practice of being fully present to each moment of our lives.

I haven’t even gotten around to trying this little exercise yet, even though I have given myself that assignment after my last few drops. I am quite the creature of habit, and very inclined to be in my head, regardless of what other tasks I may be doing. So I have both not stopped shifting on to the next task before finishing the first, but I have not yet remembered to try the two-hands practice – even having put a little note on my dresser, reminding me to do so.

I think I’ll go over there and post a bigger note. And I’m hoping that writing this piece here will help get my attention. Or maybe I’ll get up from this computer and right now go practice carrying things with two hands. I like that idea. I’m going to go do it for a couple of minutes now, and maybe give myself a little reminder to try it for a couple of minutes every day, until it becomes a new habit.

I do realize there is a risk of the two hands becoming a new habit – and that I will be writing or planning or whatever as I do it. But I’m already thinking of ways to make that practice even stronger – by paying close attention to the feel and heft of the object I’m carrying, looking at it fully, hearing the sound of it landing on the new surface, feeling all the little physical sensations from lifting, moving, turning, etc.

I’m getting excited – this could all be a lot of fun.

The right place at the right time

A few years ago, I was having one of those days where I just knew that I was running late.

I had no actual appointments that day – nor any pressing deadlines. So, literally, there was no way that I could be late. But I knew, somehow, that I was behind where I should be.

I used to have lots of those days back then – unstructured days with unrealistically long to-do lists. Everything, maybe especially errands but really everything, took longer than I had allotted for it. As I went from one errand to the next, the tension would just ramp up in me as I pushed a little harder, with each failure, to keep up with my internal schedule.

On this particular day, I was especially behind the eight ball – particularly disappointed in my performance with the tasks I did at home, and then even more as I “ran” (now there’s an interesting word) my errands.

I finally kind of gave up. I didn’t “surrender to the flow” of my day. I didn’t forgive myself for being so ineffective. No, I just gave up – and entered a familiar state of feeling inept, scattered, maybe just one step this side of absolute loser.

Then something pretty amazing happened. I was walking down the street in Evanston, a north side suburb all the way across Chicago from Oak Park, the west side suburb where I lived, performing one last errand for the day – maybe number 7 out of 11 on my list. Since I had given up on success and resigned myself that this was the last thing I was going to accomplish this afternoon, I was walking a lot slower. I actually was more present to that particular moment than I had been all day.

As I was walking south down the street, coming up to a corner, I looked across the street and saw a young guy riding his bicycle north through the intersection. And, coming from the east, a car that had just barely slowed at his stop sign as the driver prepared to come through the intersection – directly into the path of the bicycle, which he obviously did not see.

They were about ten feet from each other when I involuntarily screamed – really loud. Each of them looked up from whatever daydream in which they were immersed – and the car slammed to a halt, maybe three feet from the bike. The cyclist continued through the intersection. The driver hesitated until the bike had cleared his path, then also resumed his trip.

I was almost immediately very relieved from the absolute fright I had just felt. As I resumed walking down the street, one thought grabbed totally hold of my mind: I had been in exactly the right place at the right time. Had I not been there to scream, there seemed no question that the car would have hit the bike rider – possibly rode over him.

This realization threw all my certainty of my behindness into a cocked hat. Had I not been walking down this particular street at this particular moment of time, a potentially very bad accident would have occurred – which I was now able to avert. So, what then of running late? Had I been more “efficient” with any of my tasks at home or any of my errands, I would not have been at that particular place at that specific moment.

I suddenly had to let go of my particular frame around this day. My certainty that I was “behind” had been completely wrong. I was very, very grateful that I had been exactly where I was.

I couldn’t help but extrapolate this new perspective. What if, on the other days that I had felt equally impatient with my forward momentum (which was most days back then), I had been equally wrong? What if on at least some of those days – even if I didn’t so obviously prevent an accident – being exactly where I was, when I was, was equally just right? Maybe, had my timing been different, I would have been the one to have the accident, or the car behind me would have been able to go faster and might have had an accident. Or whatever – all the infinite number of whatevers that might have occurred, were I not where I was, when I was.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. There was obviously no way to know any of this, but I couldn’t avoid speculating. While I couldn’t know “what if”, I suddenly trusted all my going-too-slow judgments a lot less. All I really knew was that, on this particular afternoon, I seemed to have been exactly where – and at the exact right moment – that I was meant to be.

This all happened maybe seven years ago, and I still think about it. It has become a kind of symbol for me. These days, when I feel like I am running late (which is actually lots less often now), I am likely to remember that moment – and it upends my certainty. I may not, in every instance, go all the way to trusting that all is well – but I’m a lot humbler about trusting the idea that something is not well.