When everything starts to feel out of control, it’s easy to get hard. Hard-headed, hardhearted and hard to get along with.
When we get rigid, we often try to exert some autocratic form of control (“Get into bed right now, young lady!”) which leaves everyone feeling alone and depleted.
Next time your world starts spinning, take a deep breath and concentrate on softening your heart.
Let me know what happens, OK?
I know. You think you’re over it.
You’re old, you’re tired, you’ve already tried it, it’s somebody else’s turn, who cares, you’re over it, no way, not again, oh, please, forget it plus what’s the use anyway…
I feel that way too, sometimes. It’s usually a sign that I need to take a rest. Possibly several rests.
Discouragement and battle-fatigue get to all of us eventually, but the only real problem comes when you start to feel that despair is a permanent condition.
Because it’s not.
Your spirit (once it gets some rest) is an irredeemable optimist.
Your heart’s true nature is: exuberance.
Your mind is always turning toward the better, the improving, the, “well, we could try…”
And maybe those little green sprigs of hopeful thoughts cause you to groan.
“Oh, not again…” you sigh.
But, yes. Again.
And again.
And again.
And again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
And then a few thousand more times.
Because that is your real self – as resilient as a child and as bouyant as a red balloon. It’s OK. It’s the human condition. We’re tinkerers, improvers, dreamers, thinkers, grass-is-always-greener-ers.
We keep moving. (That’s the hunter-gatherer in us – always on to the next idea.)
Here’s my test: as long as you still have a solid sense of humor about Whatever-It-Is that’s wearing you out, then you’re OK.
If, however, you are feeling rather consistently grim and humorless, then it’s time for a new strategy. So rest. Do whatever it is you do to get your mojo back. Then look around, see where you are and check out the little new ideas that have started dancing around your head.
See – there you go again – dreaming new dreams. For all of us.
Thank you for that.
Those questions and anxieties that have plagued you your whole life are reflections of a mystery.
So the recurrent thought, “I’m Unlovable” might contain the Mystery of Love, and what it means to love and be loved.
The recurrent thought, “I’m Not As Good As I Should Be” points to the Mystery of Good (what is it? how do we know?) and the Mystery of Should.
And the thought, “I Don’t Belong” might indicate an interest in both the Mystery of “I” and the Mystery of Belonging. (This is one of my personal favorites.)
Instead of fighting, running, ignoring or defying those troubling thoughts, why not just sit with it?
What does the question mean?
Where do you see this question reflected in the culture?
Where is the center or middle of the Mystery?
When have you felt truly on top of this Mystery?
How has your life’s work brought you deeper into this Mystery?
No right answers here…just an opportunity to sit with it.
We all get disappointed sometimes. And mostly we follow a pretty simple process of feeling tremendously upset, thinking about it way too much, then finding some way to comfort ourselves and then moving on. With the help of some friends, some carb-heavy comfort food (or herb tea or martinis or double-chocolate
fudge crunch ice cream or whatever your narcotic of choice may be…) and perhaps a period of true unbridled wallowing, we get over it.
Mostly.
But some disappointments linger. Some become a permanent part of our internal landscape. Some even feel as though they have become part of our identity, and we almost can’t imagine letting them go, even though they cause us so much pain.
Here’s the good news: you’re reading this.
That tells me that you:
I hope we’re going to make some good progress
here – I can’t guarantee anything, but I have seen people make some miraculous shifts in very brief amounts of time, so I
wouldn’t rule anything out. Now, it’s not possible to “unthink” something, and you can’t not feel the way you feel
about something. There’s no magic pill.
But you can
unscrew the bolts a little bit on the ideas that are keeping the experience both fixed and
painful.
(One possible exception: Grief. My
experience is that other kinds of pain and disappointment can shift and move
but grief – even old grief – just sweeps up on you and feels for all the world like it just happened this morning. So I want you to be working on a specific
frustration or disappointment or failure here, and I want you to pick one, but
if it’s a Grief, then maybe, just for the purposes of today, pick another, less
knotty one.)
Everybody have one particular disappointment in mind? Good.
Maybe it’s just a little one: I over salted the
turkey meatloaf the other night and I’m a little disappointed in myself.
Or a medium one: I’m still so bummed I
never finished college, or that we got outbid on that house.
Or a big one: I got fired.
Or a really big one: I still can’t
believe he or she had that affair.
Now, let’s get a
reading here:
1 = Actually, I’m mostly
over it2 = Still stings a bit
3 = This causes me some pain when I think about it
4 = Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!!!!!!!
5 = I almost can’t imagine EVER being over this
Are you at a 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5? Whatever it is, just guesstimate and write
down the number.
It’s important that you be honest with yourself about your level of disappointment.
Sometimes we can get caught up in Enforced Optimism (“Oh, it’s all good…”) or Depressive Diminishment (“It’s no big deal”) and I don’t want that. I want you to haul the monsters out from under the bed and look them in the eye. Be straight with yourself. There’s no sense pretending that you feel all yippee-skippy when you don’t, and there’s no sense hanging on to a disappointment from which, you discover, you are really mostly already recovered.
So the first thing I want you
to do is give this event a new, more disastrous name. Really exaggerate. Unleash your Inner Drama Queen. Go for it. Write it down.
“I blew the presentation,” could be
re-named “I’m Headed For The Poorhouse For Sure!!!”
“I fell off my diet,” becomes “I Am
The Walrus, Koo Koo Ka Choo”“I didn’t finish my novel,” becomes “I Will Never Be A Real Writer Ever Ever Ever Ever Ever”
Got it?
Be melodramatic. Make yourself laugh.
(It’s great if you can do this with a trusted friend who can laugh with you.)
How does it feel to give it this extreme name? What do you notice? What shifts?
Next, I want you to write down a really minimizing name for your event. Brush it off. Spin it like a crooked politician. Or imagine you have an eccentric great-aunt who hears about your disappointment and just waves it away with a word. What does she call it?
“Nobody’s buying my product,” becomes “Well, This Has Been Some Fascinating Market Research…”
“I’ll never get another date,” becomes “Oh, Pish Posh, Silly Old Dating, Who Cares?”
“I’m chronically disorganized,” becomes “I Am So Creative With Where I Put Things!”
Again, write them down and notice how each one feels. (Don’t worry – you can always go back to the same way you’ve always felt. No pressure.)
We’re
just experimenting with perspectives here, so you don’t need to actually believe your new names for this event, but you do need to acknowledge that there may be some alternatives to the lonely, empty feeling you’ve allowed the memory of this event to trigger in you.
If you like this Step, then keep going:
– What would your dearest, best friend call this event?
– What would your Guardian Angel call it?
– What would a poet call it?
– What would a late-night infomercial spokesperson call it?
– What would a gypsy fortune-teller call it?
You get to decide what you think about it.
And that can move you from feeling like a disappointed victim to feeling like the confident, empowered, creative genius that you truly are.
NOTE: I’m curious – what names did you come up with? Please comment because I’d love to hear them!
Coming soon: Step Two!
There is no real cure for loneliness.
Except to transform it into solitude.
Solitude is remembering that there has never, ever been a single (solitary) person like you.
You arrived alone
You’ll die alone.
And in between those two things, you will be having a discreet, one-of-a-kind experience of the world.
Everyone has that “among them but not of them” feeling, at least sometimes. And creative people feel it more often, I think, than most.
Everyone yearns for connection, comfort, fusion, total immersion. We read books where people fall in love and “become as one” and we think we should have that feeling ourselves.
But that only happens in fiction.
So.
The cure is to embrace the separation. Enjoy the space. Hold yourself slightly apart. After all, you already feel apart, so go ahead and exaggerate that feeling a little bit. Observe the world around you. Retreat into your own skin and observe you having your very own point of view on the world.
That isolated, personal point of view is where your art comes from. So go ahead and create something inspired by this particular vantage point. It doesn’t have to be any good, and you don’t ever have to show it to anyone. Just go ahead and let something flow.
And now you have the real cure for solitude: art.
