My partner and I have been watching back episodes of Nova for several weeks now on PBS. Last evening, as we watched “What’s Living In You?” and “Can We Make Life?” I realized that part of why I like the show so much is that it’s filled with people from all over the world who know they don’t know … and they want to know.
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This is a direct contrast to some interactions I had this week with people who know … everything. They know what happened; they know everyone’s motivations and secrets; they know exactly what everyone else should think, do and say. They have no interest in anyone else’s point of view or experience. They ask no questions seeking understanding or more information. They don’t have to. They already know, and any information that doesn’t fit their story is an attack, a lie, or a threat.
In these posts I’ve referenced Kathryn Schultz’s book, Being Wrong, a fascinating and funny look at the myriad ways in which we’re all wrong, every day, though some folks seem to feel their lives depend upon winning and being right. Even when forced to admit we’ve been wrong about something, we avoid thinking or talking about it, concentrating instead on all the ways we were, are, and will be right!
We live in a world in which knowing is highly valued. Uncertainty or even, God forbid, admitting or contemplating the vast cosmos of what we don’t know, is seen by some as weakness. I suspect, however, that what’s really going on is simply fear. It makes us uncomfortable to think about how much we don’t know. If we discover things, we might have to make different choices, and most of us don’t want to do that. It’s too much work.
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Fear doesn’t empower me, and neither does being right or wrong, or knowing or not knowing, Power is in the inquiry, in the questions, in the curiosity about ourselves, each other and our world. Power is in our ability to learn, unlearn and relearn — also called resilience — as we navigate our lives. We’re all both right and wrong, ignorant and knowledgeable, whether we admit it or not, but not everyone can ask a good question. Not everyone is able to propose an hypothesis and see it through to becoming a theory.
One of my greatest frustrations in life is with people who don’t want to know. What is that? How can anyone choose to be willfully ignorant? I don’t mean we all need to be interested in everything, as though life is one unending mechanistic reductionist set of classes. I mean we all need to be interested … period. In ourselves and the quality of our lives and experience. In others and the qualities of their lives and experiences. In our home, Planet Earth, and how to take care of it. In problem solving and innovation. In relationships and connection. In choices and consequences. In patterns, history and creativity.
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The old map-makers drew maps of the discovered world, labeling the undiscovered areas “Terra incognita” or “Here be dragons.” What is the difference between someone who stays strictly within the confines of what the majority accepts as known and those of us who poke and pry; open forbidden doors, jars and boxes; look through microscopes and telescopes; and sail, ride, walk, stumble or crawl in search of dragons?
It boggles my mind to imagine some people find safety in not knowing, in not understanding. How can we make effective choices if we’re missing information? How can we heal, or learn to do better? How can we break dysfunctional patterns in our behavior? How can we have healthy, authentic relationships with ourselves or anyone else?
The hardest part of this issue for me is how disconnected I feel from people who say they don’t want to know. I think of life as an adventure, and I want playmates. I want to share what I’ve learned and learn more. I want to live the questions. I want to explore, reframe, turn beliefs and ideas inside out and upside down. I want to master new tools and skills. I feel sad when people in my life can’t — or won’t — play with me. It’s hard to feel my curiosity and questions are threatening to others. It silences me, and when I have to be silent, or less than I am, I’m bored.
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The older I get, the less I realize I know. The older I get, the more willing I am to be wrong. The older I get, the more comfortable and confident I am with my ability to research, read, synthesize, understand, experiment, challenge and learn. I notice how angry that makes some people, and how intolerant some folks are of questions, especially uncomfortable questions.
Terra incognita. What a wonderful phrase. Anything could be there, anything at all. I’ll send you a postcard with a footprint of a dragon.
I’ve been sitting in the breakdown lane this weekend, watching traffic pass me by, (all their cars work!) and wondering why my car, which has been just fine, has suddenly stopped functioning.
We’ve probably all done this at least once, literally speaking. Metaphorically speaking, we’ve all done it many times. We go along in our small world, and as far as we know everything is status quo and just what we expect, and then, suddenly, it isn’t. Things go off the rails and all we can think is WTF?
Sometimes I’m the one who has suddenly gone off the rails. Except, looking back, I realize it wasn’t sudden at all. Sometimes the breakdown was years in the making, but I wasn’t present enough with myself and my feelings to notice the gradual fraying and come up with a plan. Grimly, I hung on, hoping, waiting, hurting myself, arguing with what was, denying my experience, trying harder, drowning in shame, crippled by fear, until I absolutely could not hang on any longer and my last fingernail tore out.
Then I let go, after it was far too late to problem solve or help myself or anyone else involved.
I still regret I have not always had the support or resources to make different choices. I hurt myself, and I hurt others. I take responsibility for my behavior and clean up what I can, but some things just can’t be fixed — and perhaps shouldn’t be in any case.
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I think a lot about these sudden moments where things fall apart, either within us or between us. The breakdown lane is like a time out, an enforced pause. In a moment or two, the whole aspect of the day, the future, and my plans have changed. I realize I’m not in control. All I have is an unpleasant snarl of disappointed expectations, thwarted intentions, frustration, anger and a need to blame someone or something, including myself.
A broken car or piece of equipment is one thing. An interpersonal breakdown is another.
Few things are more painful than feeling unloved, unwanted or rejected by someone we care about. Hell, it’s painful when we feel those things from someone we don’t care about. Imagine being an immigrant in this country right now.
I have felt unloved, unwanted and rejected. I’ve also had loved ones tell me they feel unloved, unwanted or rejected by me. As I know that’s not how I feel about them, I question my certainty that others feel that way about me. If they’re misinterpreting my actions, words and choices, perhaps I’m doing the same thing.
Our feelings are real. The stories we make up about them may not be. In other words, I might feel rejected when the person I’m interacting with has no intention of sending that message. The way I express love and affection may be so different from someone else’s idea of how to express it that it’s lost in translation.
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That doesn’t mean it’s not present.
I focus a great deal on language in this blog. I do that because words matter. They have layers of meaning. It seems to me nearly every interpersonal breakdown can be traced to a misunderstanding over a definition of terms. Getting at the bottom-line meaning of a word is as easy as looking it up:
Friend: “A person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.” (Oxford online dictionary)
Pretty simple, right? We all know what it means to be a friend and have a friend.
Except we don’t. We might agree on that basic definition, but I suspect we each assign a whole world of additional personal meaning to the word friend, and that world contains longings, memories, hopes and fears, expectations, deep needs, beliefs, and old scars and wounds.
I’ve been thinking about that. When I talk about, think about and participate in friendship, what does that mean to me? What is a friend, besides someone I know and with whom I have a bond of mutual affection?
It’s a great question. I wish I could ask everyone I know. I won’t, because for some reason this kind of question seems to make most people uncomfortable, but feel free to volunteer an answer!
At this point in my life, I’m not interested in constructing relationships out of expectations and an attachment to outcomes. I’ve always operated in a framework of both of those in my relationships, and it’s never worked. In the last four years I’ve taken a clear, cold look at my previously unconscious expectations of self and others and the myriad ways in which I’ve sabotaged myself and others with attachment to certain agendas and outcomes.
What I do instead (and a joyous, fascinating, loving process it is) is observe with curiosity and interest as relationships form and change. Viewed from this perspective, it’s like nurturing a child, a garden where we’ve planted seeds, an animal, or a piece of land. Freed from my extremely limited and limiting expectations and agenda, I can watch and appreciate all the unexpected, magnificent ways we are — and life is.
It’s the difference between saying: “This is who I (or the other) must or must not be,” and “Who are you?” or, even better, “I want everything you are and nothing you’re not.” Say that (and mean it) to yourself or someone you love every day and I guarantee your relationships will change for the better.
So, now, what do I mean by a friend?
A friend is someone with whom I can laugh, explore new information and ideas, excavate less-than-useful beliefs and patterns, learn and unlearn. A friend is someone with whom I engage in a contest of generosity. I want to ask questions, pull things out from under the bed and let the cat sniff at them, be wrong, problem solve, consider options. I want to practice boundaries, tolerance, respect and being real. I want to allow and be allowed. I want relationships that make my life bigger. I want to share reading, movies, music, memories, silence, work, nature, my truths. I want someone who says, “make yourself big!” while pursuing that same goal themselves.
(Not coincidentally, this is the kind of friend I strive to be to others.)
When I consider the above paragraph, and imagine each of us could write an equally long but different paragraph, the concept of friend goes rapidly from a simple one-sentence definition to something much more complicated and personal. This wouldn’t be so problematic if we were aware of it, but we’re not. We say friend, knowing exactly what we mean, and never considering the person we’re talking to, who’s also using the word, means something different.
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Then, one day, these two invisible sets of definitions, expectations and desired outcomes collide and we experience hurt, outrage, betrayal, anger, disappointment, rejection, fear, and disconnection.
I admit I have no fix for this ubiquitous problem. Even being aware of how differently we define terms doesn’t save me from ending up sitting in the breakdown lane. It would be good if the problematic words in any given relationship had a tag warning us of problems ahead if we aren’t careful to understand one another from the beginning.
On the other hand, that would take out the part where we sit in the breakdown lane trying to understand what just happened, how and if to fix it, and how our choices led to it. Uncomfortable as it is, I value that opportunity.
Sitting in the breakdown lane with my heartbeat and breath. Feeling my feelings. Curious about what will happen next. Confident that when it’s time to move on I’ll know it and do so. Considering what I might learn in this space. Getting bigger. Getting bigger. Getting bigger.
The word “respect” is jumping up and down in my life this week, hand thrust in the air, saying “me, me, me!”
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This post started with more from R. D. Laing’s book, Knots:
“A son should respect his father. He should not have to be taught to respect his father. It is something that is natural.
It is the duty of children to respect their parents. And it is the duty of parents to teach their children to respect them, by setting a good example.
Parents who do not set their children a good example don’t deserve respect.“
As usual, I have thoughts and questions. ‘Should’ is a word I shun. It implies arguing with what is. Who says a son (or any child) should respect his father? I believe this rule has its roots in the Bible and/or other spiritual traditions. Does that mean it can’t be questioned? (This is a trick question. If you say no, I will immediately start questioning it!)
Is respect ever a given? Do we (must we) “naturally” respect others? Are we born knowing how to respect others? Are we born knowing how to respect ourselves, or do we learn by watching those around us? (For more on parenting and respect, here’s the perspective of parenting expert and author of Connection Parenting, Pam Leo.)
What’s a “good example,” and who gets to define it?
What the heck does respect mean, anyway?
According to Oxford online dictionary, the meaning of respect includes “a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicted by their abilities, qualities, or achievements” as well as “due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions of others.”
Aha! Two distinct meanings.
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Across both digital and face-to-face human interaction, I see a troubling pattern of boundary loss and deliberate blurring of terms such as respect. It seems suddenly we are expected to blindly respect, in the sense of deeply admire, everyone, no matter their words or actions. Worse than that, we’re supposed to agree with the ideologies and beliefs of others. Respect and agreement have come to mean the same thing. If we don’t agree with someone’s thoughts, feelings and beliefs, we’re haters and bigots. We have no respect.
Newsflash: Agreement and respect are not the same thing. They are not mutually exclusive, but they have different meanings. They may appear together. They can and do exist independent of one another.
Additionally, disagreement is not hate and is no measure of compassion, which can be fully present with either agreement or disagreement.
I found a perfect explanation of this in the Wiki entry for conflation:
“In an alternate illustrative example, respect is used both in the sense of “recognise a right” and “have high regard for”. We can recognise someone’s right to the opinion the United Nations is secretly controlled by alien lizards on the moon, without holding this idea in high regard. But conflation of these two different concepts leads to the notion that all ideological ideas should be treated with respect, rather than just the right to hold these ideas.”
I can understand the desperate search for some kind of certainty in life, some kind of code-breaking formula to help us make sense of everything from relationships to global change. I also understand many people are so busy trying to survive and cope with their day-to-day lives that discussions, explorations and distinctions of the kind I’m preoccupied with have no meaning. The world is full of people who take the attitude of TLDR (too long; didn’t read). It’s so much easier to attach to a meme or belief system along the lines of they’re for me or against me.
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Unfortunately, reality is a lot more complicated than that and life is not black and white. Nothing is certain. People change. New information appears. We’re frequently trying to unlearn. In spite of how much we want to be right, much of the time we’re wrong. Refusing to take in any new information for fear it will threaten our safe place to stand will not keep us in control or protect us. What it will do is wither our critical thinking skills, our curiosity and our appreciation of others.
I endeavor to treat everyone respectfully, by which I mean I have space for people to believe what they believe. In general, I am successful in this intention. That being said, I view respect similarly to tolerance, as a peace treaty. Nobody likes to be attacked, and I’m no exception to that. I don’t attack others, but I will defend myself. I don’t think we’re all automatically entitled to respect, and I certainly don’t think I am. I’m also perfectly prepared for others to disagree with me on any given subject. That doesn’t mean (to me) we can’t have a respectful conversation about the issue we disagree upon, and it doesn’t mean I excise people from my life who hold different beliefs than I do.
I also recognize there are people in the world who intend to silence all disagreement and demand respect from everyone without giving it. This is cluster B behavior, and it’s about power and control over others. This population in particular seeks to conflate things like respect and agreement, using malicious and often ridiculous labels and jargon, threats, punishment and violence to silence and intimidate others. This behavior is called coercion. Some people say they want respect, but what they’re really after is agreement. Respect alone does not satisfy them.
I was once confronted by an extremely unpleasant woman who demanded to know if I am pro-choice or pro-life. It wasn’t her business, but I had no wish to escalate her drama, so I answered her truthfully and quietly: “Both.”
She immediately became both abusive and threatening, demanding I answer one way or another and telling me I couldn’t be both.
Excuse me? I can and am both. I said above I can understand why people adhere to black-and-white thinking, but I will not have it forced upon me. I don’t agree with such thinking or trust it, and I refuse to employ it. I was willing to respect her right to an either/or ideology, but I pushed back when she tried to force it on me.
Ironically, I find myself to be The Enemy, even among loved ones, because I disagree with some current ideologies, or I refuse to take a polarized stance. As I am one of the least judgmental and most respectful (in the sense of “due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions of others,”) people I know, this is a bitter twist, and the injustice of it hurts. Reciprocity is nice, if you can get it.
Which brings me to the last aspect of respect I’ve been thinking about, which probably should be first, if I wrote this essay in order of importance.
What about self-respect?
Who teaches us to respect ourselves, or is that innate or “natural?” If it’s taught, do we learn best if the adults around us model self-respect and support us in giving it to ourselves? If it’s innate, can the adults around us damage our self-respect or force us to choose between respecting ourselves and respecting them? If we have little or no self-respect, are we greatly compelled to persuade or coerce others to support our beliefs? What brings us more satisfaction, respecting ourselves or feeling respected by others? Can the respect of others ever replace our self-respect?
As usual, I have more questions than answers, but I can say two things with confidence:
Respect and agreement are not the same thing.
I have no power to make others respect me, but I have complete power over whether I respect myself.
I’m currently reading The Intuitive Way by Penney Peirce. Various notes and bookmarks remind me I’ve started it before, but I didn’t finish it. I picked it up again because I’m also reading The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker (for the second time), and he talks about how important intuition is in our ability to avoid danger.
I’ve always been interested in intuition. What is it? How does it work? I know from personal experience it’s a real kind of perception or knowing, but I also know many people view it as “woo” and scientifically unprovable. I’ve frequently been met with fury and denial when I voiced an intuition about someone’s state of mind or behavior. Certainly I might be wrong, but then why all the fuss?
As I began writing this post I explored Peirce’s website for a few minutes. I listened to an interview and read a couple of her posts. Yes, it looks rather New Age and “woo” to me.
On the other hand, that doesn’t mean she’s wrong!
As a matter of fact, science is catching up to what we call intuition. Scientists and researchers like Paul Ekman, who recognized how important fleeting micro expressions and body language are, have begun to assemble the neurological pieces of the process of intuition. Experts in their own fields like de Becker are revisiting the importance of intuition to our resilience and survival.
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In any event, I picked up The Intuitive Way again to see if it was something I wanted to work with and explore or pass on to the library for donation. I’m glad I did. I’m uninterested in debating whether intuition is real or a worthy subject for study, but I’m very much interested in any tools which might assist me in healing and living a more joyful life and/or shaping my creativity. The book is filled with provocative writing exercises. I remember now it takes me ten minutes to read a chapter and ten days to play with all the exercises.
When I learned emotional intelligence I was introduced to the work of Byron Katie. Her great question is: Who are you without your story? Peirce’s book asks the same question in a slightly different way, providing exercises challenging the reader to replace fearful, limiting beliefs with those that are loving and life-enhancing.
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Who am I without my story? What a wonderful, important question. What a game changer. It’s like asking ourselves who we are if we stand bodiless in some infinite but undefined space with no memories, no objects around us, and no other context. If we’re not a name; an age; a family member; a job; an ethnicity and tribe; a set of beliefs, experiences, memories and stories, then who the hell are we?
My mind boggles, and the artist in me salivates. So much of my self-identity is bound up with stories about my life and experience, and many of those stories are small, hard, stony things about breaking, severing, smashing, exile and futility.
I have fantasies about who I’d like to be and how I’d like to feel, of course. They’re fantasies, though, not the real story. I know the difference.
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But do I?
We write our stories from our feelings and experiences, many of which occurred in childhood. Do children necessarily see a wide picture? Are they able to understand all the behavior and choices of the adults around them? Are they able to process their feelings and separate them from their thoughts about their feelings?
I doubt it. I certainly wasn’t able to.
As we grow up, we have opportunities to compare our stories with those of our siblings, or others who inhabited our childish world, and we notice our stories aren’t the only ones in the mix. Everyone has a story, and they aren’t the same one. A word or event burned in my brain might be something no one else even remembers.
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Stories are slippery things, powerful as an anaconda and just as hard to pin down.
All that being so, how would it be to simply erase the limiting parts of my story ,to find the file, open it, hit “delete” and then empty the trash of all the feelings, conclusions and thoughts my story carried? No more story. Just a clean space …
… In which to write a new story!
As a storyteller, I’m fascinated by all the creation stories from around the globe. As a writer, I’ve even written a couple of my own. I’ve never considered writing a story about my own creation before, though. After all, I already know all about the story of my first ten years. I’ve been telling it to myself for decades. It’s shaped me profoundly.
But would a different story have shaped me differently?
Would a different story shape me differently now?
I don’t suggest we deny or bury our feelings and memories. I’ve never found that particularly useful. I think of my story as an old-fashioned quilt, carefully pieced together out of all kinds of scraps of feelings, memories and experiences from which I formed conclusions and beliefs over my lifetime.
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I can lift that quilt out of the cedar chest of my psyche, unfold it, hang it on a clothesline in the sun and spring breeze and examine it. Which pieces make me feel stained, frayed, torn or damaged? Which pieces are vibrant, vivid, gorgeously colored and textured?
After the quilt has aired, I can unpick stitches and remove the pieces that hurt, distort or limit me, replacing them with scraps that make me feel happy, confident and loving. I can rewrite some of those childhood monsters and villains, understanding now people are complex and we don’t always know their motives or secrets. I can consider painful pieces of my story from the view of another character in it instead of from my own narrow perspective. As I unpick stitches and loosen up my old story quilt, I can think about forgiveness, gratitude and being wrong, and revel in stitching new patterns and colors into it.
Rewriting our story, like reworking a quilt, takes time. Writing our original story took time. Events happened in our lives. We had feelings and experiences. We had thoughts about our feelings and experiences. We came to certain conclusions about who we are, who others are and how life works. We wove a story and told it to ourselves over and over again, until we believed it completely and it became unconscious. We carry our story with us into the world and it influences every choice and action.
The thing about story is it’s limited and limiting. It can never catch all of reality, even in a single moment. If we understand this and work to bring our personal stories back into consciousness, we become aware of all the ways our stories hurt and/or help us. They can limit and paralyze us or inspire us with courage and confidence. It’s all up to us, because we are the authors of our own stories. We have the power to rewrite.
Many cling to their stories as though they were a matter of life and death, not to mention identity. I’ve noticed some people with miserable stories cling the hardest. I can only conclude for some, even the most wretched and harrowing story provides some kind of a payoff for the one holding it. Such a person doesn’t want to rewrite their story, in spite of how ineffective or painful it may seem to be.
I choose not to be run by my story. I can do, be and contribute more than parts of my old story say I can. I don’t want to validate and reinforce outdated conclusions that made me fearful and small. I don’t want to continually irritate and open up old wounds.
I refuse to be a victim, especially not a victim of myself!
So I’m rewriting and revising my own creation story from before the beginning, when two cells joined and created the miracle of my life. From those two cells came the complex human being I am, and a complex human being contains and creates many different kinds of stories with many different feelings, experiences and thoughts.
I came across a poem by Ursula K. LeGuin (see below) and found it beautiful and timely. The wheel of cycles and seasons has swung around to the resurrection of light once more, and we wish one another a happy new year, each of us with our own hopes and fears for the months ahead.
For much of my life, I equated love with protection. When I became a parent, the vulnerability of my sons added exponentially to my own. In common with many parents, I struggled fiercely to protect them through infancy, childhood and beyond. Naturally, we protect others from what we ourselves most fear. In my case these fears include pain, loss, addiction, abuse and abandonment. I tried to shield my children from those people and experiences that hurt me, lest they be hurt in the same ways.
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Certainly, in the case of small children, animals and others who have no voice or are unable to use it, protection can be an act of love, but I’ve thought for some time now that we carry it too far, especially when we seek to “protect” our perfectly capable adult children, partners and friends. At some point our impulse to protect others becomes selfish. We do not want to bear witness to a loved one’s pain, let alone our own. We do not welcome the responsibility of telling the truth. Protection becomes a pathological means of disempowering others and binding them to us because we don’t want to be alone or the independence of our loved ones threatens us.
To be over-protected is to be without the freedom to develop confidence in our own good sense, strength and courage. We’re never allowed to stumble and fall and we don’t have to figure out how to comfort ourselves, clean our scraped knees and move forward. We over-protect out of fear or control, not love, and our constant vigilance of our loved one or loved ones teaches them fear as well. Fear makes our lives smaller, not bigger.
This new year, I don’t wish you photoshopped health, prosperity and happiness, and I don’t have a list of resolutions I hope will lead me to those things, either.
This year, I wish us each the ability to stand in our own power.
May we learn to love our bodies as they are. May we live joyfully in our skin. Let us teach our bodies new things and work with them to become as strong and healthy as we can. May we allow our bodies to be and to change.
This year, may we make mistakes. May we become lost and confused, and then find our way again. May we find out we’re wrong, and tell everyone. May we be vulnerable, get hurt and heal ourselves.
May we wander far from home without a map and walk a thousand miles, exploring new places and ideas. May we listen to a different kind of music and read a different kind of book. May we do something we’re afraid of.
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Let the new year bring us laughter that makes our bellies ache and tears that fall like warm rain on our anguish. Let us fall head over heels in love with something or someone as though it’s the first time we’ve ever done it and we just know it will all be perfect. Let us make friends with our rage and give it something productive to do. Let us tell someone about our deepest shame.
May we know loneliness, boredom, disappointment and humiliation, and balance them with companionship, engagement, satisfaction and validation.
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May we risk, dare and dream. May we learn to believe in ourselves. Let us burn our candle at both ends. Let us wear ourselves out with living. May we hear our lives whisper and speak our own truths. Let us learn and grow. Let us allow ourselves to be seen and rejected.
May we long for a home, find one, make one and lose it. May we make another and choose to walk away from it. May we learn how to come home to ourselves no matter where we are or who we’re with.
May we let go of our protection. Let us tear ourselves away from it. Let us outgrow it. May we feel what we feel with every cell of our body. May we make our thoughts, emotions, curiosity and creativity big and hold nothing back.
Go out into the sun flood of your life, my friends, my sons, my family, and know that I hold you in my heart. Know that I believe in you. Know that I neither ask for your protection nor seek to protect you, for none of us need it and love is bigger than that.
Go out from me into the new year, dear ones, and if you choose to return, please bring strange things.
Please bring strange things. Please come bringing new things. Let very old things come into your hands. Let what you do not know come into your eyes. Let desert sand harden your feet. Let the arch of your feet be the mountains. Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps and the ways you go be the lines on your palms. Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing and your outbreath be the shining of ice. May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words. May you smell food cooking you have not eaten. May the spring of a foreign river be your navel. May your soul be at home where there are no houses. Walk carefully, well loved one, walk mindfully, well loved one, walk fearlessly, well loved one. Return with us, return to us, be always coming home.
