بخش 2

The Thorny and Golden Past

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

—DAVID C. MCCULLOUGH

Historian and author

AN INTRODUCTION TO LESSONS 11 TO 19—PERSONAL LESSONS DRAWN FROM THE PAST

Most of us have read or heard some version of statement written a hundred years ago by George Santayana—a Spanish-born American philosopher and author of Life of Reason. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It took me years to summon the fortitude to revisit and recall the chapters of my own past. Well, I’m here to report that even though the journey was painful, the knowledge that I unearthed in the process has turned out to be my own buried treasure—which was waiting for me all along, right in my own backyard. I’m also here to say that if you’re anything like the way that I used to be—either avoiding the chapters of your own history or giving it too much power to hurt you now—you, too, are missing out on the buried gold that can be found in your past.

The treasure that I’m talking about comes up in almost every Q&A that I’ve ever given, in questions that I hear all the time about resources that many consider to be rare: “Where did you find the hope that you wouldn’t always be homeless?” “How were you able to see your dreams coming true, when nobody else could?” “Where did you learn to believe in yourself?” The answers consistently take me back to the past, to the soil of childhood, adolescence, and my early adult years—even to events and people whose lives came before me. That’s where we all can hit the mother lode. And yet, the irony for many of us is how much we resist going to dig in the first place. For much of my adulthood, my feeling was that I was glad to have gotten out of there alive. What could possibly compel me to go take a tour of my personal hell? Well, for starters, listening to others tell their stories allowed me to come to the conclusion that we’ve all got our own versions of hellish moments and memories. On the flip side, even in the thorniest, most difficult pasts that I’ve heard others recall, there were also pockets of light, humor, pleasure, discovery, accomplishment, and triumphant decisions.

The recognition that it wasn’t just me was one incentive to brave the journey back. But the main reason I had to choose to do the work was that until I dealt with residual issues—fear, disappointment, shame, loss, abandonment, powerlessness—the memories were going to haunt me anyway. Amazingly, when I finally decided to stop being haunted and to turn around and say “Boo!” right back, I found a freedom that I’d never known. Painful? No question. But it’s the most important decision I ever made that has freed me to pursue and claim the happyness that has blessed me beyond measure. Who would have known?

I have also discovered that when making decisions about the present or the future, there’s no better place to look for guidance than the past with its storehouse of personal experience and education—a virtual “Library of Resources,” as I call it. And that’s not just me. We each have such a place in our memory vaults where wisdom waits. We can figure out where we became stuck with faulty beliefs that still stand in our way, how to free ourselves from our fears, or how we can reconnect to empowering beliefs. Best of all, we can come away with evidence of our strengths and our potential, which we may have forgotten or left behind.

Remember that when looking into the past, just one of many areas where we can find useful resources, it’s not necessary to relive every moment. The purpose of taking an inventory of your earlier personal lessons is to reexamine and learn from those that left their mark. You’ll then be able to look at where you are now or where you’re headed and say to yourself—Oh, yeah, I’ve seen this movie before!

Yes, getting to the knowledge can be like climbing through thorny vines that obscure the path. It’s not an overnight process either. Anyone who has been in therapy or has dealt with issues from the past through writing or other outlets can attest to its difficulty and its value. This isn’t to discourage anyone from the hard work of unearthing the gold of who you are—nobody can do that for you but you. On the contrary, if you are too cool for school when it comes to your past—as I once was—you’re missing out on a lifetime of dividends you could be earning from the stock you own that you don’t even know about!

As an overview to the lessons that we’re getting ready to cover, an e-mail from Scott in Michigan can give us a jumping-off place. Scott began by noting, “While we are different in many ways (I am white and grew up in a different generation), there are some similarities.” Though he considered his childhood to be nowhere near as challenging as mine, he said there were enough similarities that he felt compelled to recall forgotten events from his past that were enlightening for him. A very successful banker and active volunteer for several meaningful causes, Scott realized that his leftover worry from his younger years kept him from savoring his success: My parents divorced when I was an adolescent. Both remarried within ten months and since that time I felt a substantial amount of instability, until the last few years…. During the more intense times of fear I always worried about being homeless someday even though it was probably not realistic. Because of this, I even took in a homeless man one winter when he was begging…. In addition to a daughter from earlier in my life, I recently married a widow, and now I have two more children. I am truly blessed to have what I have now, but hope that someday I can help those in need in much greater ways.

Scott’s story gives us a terrific example of someone who is continuing to learn more about himself from his thorny and golden past and leads us into the resources we’ll be exploring next in Lessons 11 to 19

Some of these personal lessons to be drawn from the past may be familiar to you already. Perhaps you’ve been doing some digging of your own for a while and this will all be just a stroll in the park. And if it isn’t, be resolved that you’re not going to be one of those people doomed to repeat the past. You’re here to set yourself free.

LESSON 11

Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Yesterday?

KEYWORD: Freedom

There’s a guy I know very well who got to a place in his life, somewhere during his early forties, when he finally acknowledged that there could be something of value in his past and dared to go dig under his feet. In the eyes of others he already had his riches, having attained many important objectives that he had set out for himself. Very few people knew the extent of what he had overcome, and the generational cycles he had chosen to break, although it was apparent to them that he was a self-made man. In fact, he was a very happy person, and he had much to celebrate—success as an entrepreneur, fulfillment as a parent, meaningful personal and business relationships, and rewarding outlets for empowering others. For all intents and purposes, life was great, and he had no complaints.

But until he made a decision to deal with darker stretches of his life, he wasn’t sure what to do with lingering memories from the past—mainly the painful years of his childhood and youth, experiences that he rarely if ever shared with anyone else. Abandoned by his biological father, whom he never knew, he had spent time in foster care when his mother served jail sentences for her attempts to free herself from his stepfather’s violence. This guy had worked hard to compartmentalize those memories and the powerless feelings of being a child and not being able to protect his loved ones. He had kept the most painful events, like the time in his teens when he was a victim of sexual assault, as firmly locked-up secrets. After all, he came from a long line of people who practiced their version of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” of not discussing painful or unpleasant matters. He saw no incentive to change the tradition.

If this story sounds familiar, you’ve probably figured out that the guy is me. Today, my life is literally an open book. But there was once a time when I was the Undisputed Heavyweight Champion when it came to avoiding the past! If you have never had a similar aversion and already have the freedom to access the meaningful memory files of your life, count yourself blessed. If, on the other hand, you’ve stamped some passages “secret and confidential”—never to be exposed to the light of day, even to you—it’s probably time to gently ask yourself, Who’s afraid of the big, bad yesterday?

By the time I was in my early twenties, it might have taken some interrogation, but in answer to the preceding question, I would have eventually forced myself to raise my hand and admit—I am! Instead of doing anything about it, however, I had other priorities—or so I told myself. It was much more important, or so I felt, to contend with questions about the present and the future.

The first chink in the armor happened one night when I went out with friends to one of the hot and happening comedy clubs that were booming in San Francisco in the early 1980s. The act we’d gone to see was Richard Pryor, the headliner, already the reigning King of Comedy, and the recent survivor of a freebasing accident in which he had allegedly been picked up by the police for running down the street on fire. Early into his set, Pryor started joking about what many rumored hadn’t been an accident but a suicide attempt by explaining that it was set off by an explosion when he tried to dunk an Oreo cookie into a glass of pasteurized milk. His deadpan expression at proposing such an innocent far-fetched story brought down the house. Then he talked about waking up in an ambulance surrounded by white people and thinking, “Ain’t this a bitch? I done died and they sent me to the wrong @*$$! heaven!” If that wasn’t irreverent enough, he topped it all off by making the same cheap joke that lesser comics were trying as he waved a lit match onstage and laughingly said, “What’s this? Man, it’s Richard Pryor running down the street!” I was amazed that he could take the most painful experiences from his life and turn them into material. And that’s what he did with everything, digging down into the depths of his most private pain, holding it up to the light, and squeezing every last laugh out of it.

At first, I thought it was just me who was laughing so hard that I was crying and doubling over in my chair, until I looked around and saw that everybody in the room had been seized by the healing spirit of humor. It was like being in church, and Richard Pryor was telling truths like a preacher, freeing us from some of those same dark places where he’d been before.

How did he do it? He turned over every stone that had something interesting to reveal from his past—his rocky relationships, all the odd jobs he’d worked after he was expelled from school at the age of fourteen, his ill-fated stint in the army. Nothing that he had lived through was off-limits.

The thing about Pryor that made him perhaps the most influential comedian of all time was that as much as he made you laugh, he also made you think. He certainly made me think about the possibility of being able to examine the darker memories of my own past. Was the prospect of doing that scary? Of course it was. But the thought also occurred to me that by avoiding the terrible stuff from the past, I was missing out on all the good stuff, too. What compelled me was the vision of having the same freedom that I had witnessed that night to make something useful out of everything or anything that I had experienced.

Almost another twenty years went by before that vision came to pass. If not for the nudging that came from loved ones, and my choice to make sure that my children didn’t inherit the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, it might have taken longer for me to break the cycle of silence.

The real impetus for finding the key and unlocking the cage where the big, bad yesterday was fattening itself up, at my expense, was a speaking opportunity in front of a group of urban middle-school kids. From the comments and questions that were being voiced by many of the teenagers, I understood that they’d been hearing the same negative messages about their futures that had been sent to me. When one of the boys announced that he might like to have his own financial planning firm one day and the rest of the group started to snicker, I said something that later was included in the film version of my story—something that was said as much to those kids as it was to the boy that I had once been. “Don’t listen to them,” I said. “In fact, don’t ever let anybody tell you that you can’t do something. Not your parents, your teachers. Nobody.” Then I found myself talking about events and circumstances of where I’d grown up that I hadn’t shared with anyone for years. Suddenly, they all leaned forward in their seats, and the light of possibilities came into their eyes. The incredible freedom that I had just found to finally talk about where I’d come from was better than anything I could have imagined.

From then on, I continued to strive to be as free as Richard Pryor to drag out whatever part of my past that could be turned into something useful for myself or for others. Though it was going to be some time before most of the thorns had been cleared, the most freeing discovery that I made, right off the bat, was that even though it was very painful to remember and reopen past wounds, I no longer was powerless.

A few empowering steps for applying this lesson can be taken by anyone who is ready to admit to the fear of yesterday. The first step is to remind yourself of what you’re missing by disowning so much of who you are.

The second step to freeing yourself from the power that the big, bad yesterday may have over you is to come meet it armed with questions. You’re not intending to live in the past or allow yourself to get swept up in old stories. Rather, you’re on an important fact-finding mission. If you’ve ever seen interviews of stand-up comics like Richard Pryor, you’ve probably heard many of the top comedy stars talk about how they’ll write down a topic they want to rant about or expound upon and then go hunt for material directly from their pasts. You, too, are entitled to the same freedom. Jot down a topic of interest or a vivid experience and see what wisdom and life lessons you can retrieve from yesterday.

LESSON 12

In Your Library of Resources, Value All Experience

KEYWORD: Self-awareness

Not long ago, I had lunch with a Wall Street colleague who had recently retired and had planned on spending more time with family while catching up on his reading, hobbies, and philanthropic efforts. “Chris,” he said, “retirement is the worst thing that ever happened to me!” Like many highly driven individuals, he had never known what it was like not to have every single minute of his day plotted out for him. The luxury of free time, he swore, was going to kill him. If it didn’t, apparently his wife was going to do the job instead. No matter what she suggested—everything from launching a new business from home, to traveling around the world on a sailboat, to teaching a class at a local community college, to studying far-out subject matter like astrophysics—it all seemed pointless.

He had even tried therapy—which for him was true desperation. The diagnosis was that he was suffering from a radical loss of identity that had been completely tied to his professional life. All of a sudden, here he was, home alone, a stranger to himself. His job had become who he was. Without it, he had ceased to exist.

Countless individuals today may be finding themselves suddenly disconnected from who they thought they were—due to the loss of a job, not necessarily from voluntary retirement. When who you are is based on what you do, the shock of no longer doing it can be devastating.

Along these lines, I reassured my friend that he wasn’t alone in feeling estranged from himself and that there were plenty of others who could relate. I’d been in similar shoes before. Now, to be fair to myself, maybe I wasn’t as stubborn or as set in my ways as this guy. But I promised him that if I could overcome my own unwillingness to deal with the past, so could he. The first step was to go on a quest for self-awareness—a major reward that awaits any of us who are willing to get past the thorns.

How? Well, I suggested, like starting out in any other pursuit, by educating yourself. Only this was an education as to your own history. That was, after all, one of the logical arguments that I’d made to myself. But where should one go to get that education and earn new self-awareness? What came to mind next was an image of a kind of library. My idea was that each one of us has such a place, our very own Library of Resources, where we can visit and check out any book or article about any aspect of our lives and experiences that we need to access.

This concept appealed to my friend. But wouldn’t going in there be overwhelming? It would almost be like putting in any word on an Internet search engine. How would you know which of the millions of results was relevant?

“Great question,” I admitted. Then the essence of this very personal life lesson became clear to me—that everything we’ve experienced is relevant and part of who we are, whether we like it or not. As Einstein wrote about what constitutes an education, “All true learning is experience. Everything else is just information.” Hence—In your Library of Resources, value all experience.

My friend decided that it was worth the effort to peruse his past to see if there was something of value he could find that might help him understand why retirement bothered him so much. The self-awareness that he gained from the process allowed him to acknowledge that way back in his early days there was a lonely child. What he thought had been a privileged life, on second glance, involved spending more time with a nanny than with his parents or older siblings who were gone by the time he was in school. It was painful to learn that he never knew much about the people who mattered most to him. But then his practical side, one of his strengths, came up with a solution to learn more about all of his relatives. The next thing I knew, he was busy doing extensive genealogy charts for both sides of his family. No, he couldn’t give himself another childhood in place of the one he’d missed. But he could have fun getting to know himself, starting where he was. His next plan was to travel to some of the places where his ancestors had come from.

My concept for a virtual visit to your Library of Resources can be applied with the power of your imagination whenever you feel compelled to find valuable experience from your own archives. You might be surprised to learn that you probably are already doing this on your own whenever you choose to learn something new. It’s a natural reflex when you’re transitioning to an unfamiliar stage of your life to refer to the past as a ready-made guidebook. The challenge, I’ve learned, is to remember to not just skim the surface, but to crack open those files and get to the self-awareness stored within them.

LESSON 13

Draw the Line of Your Life

KEYWORD: Discovery

During a nonprofit organization’s strategic planning meeting in 2003. The professional strategic planner suggested that before we talk about issues confronting the organization, we should each identify what role we could better play in the collective pursuit we had undertaken. And in order to share the special strengths and skills each of us had to contribute, our strategic planner asked each of us to write our life story down on one piece of paper. She then took out Magic Markers and passed them around to the group. Everyone assembled, eight or nine of us, exchanged confused expressions. “Oh, it’s easy,” she said, “just draw the line of your life.” The grumbling began. I was the loudest. We were all pressed for time, many of us busy executives, with other agendas. The strategic planner explained that we all have our stories of how we arrived at where we are—in life, in our jobs, in our relationships—wherever we are. Telling our individual stories, she insisted, was important in personal and professional contexts, whether we were doing an organizational history or mission statement, or putting together a professional curriculum vitae. By drawing the line of our life, apparently, we could tell our own story in shorthand—and by doing so create this treasure map to the major events, turning points, and stepping-stones that had brought each of us to the strategic planning session.

The point was to be as visual as possible, to start as far back as an earliest memory and then draw the line without words, but with all the twists, turns, ups and downs, bumps and grinds, highs and lows. Though I needed more than one piece of paper, when I was finished, I looked and saw the line of my life that I had just drawn. It reminded me of the Bay Area Rapid Transit maps, and the many times that my son and I had slept on the train—riding it out as far as it would go and then returning again. Stark as the memory was, I could see how all the stops along the way had been necessary for my growth and movement forward.

Many different emotions swirled inside of me as I appreciated all the ground that had been covered. Instead of my early days looking as dark and dreary as I’d remembered, I could see the pockets of light that had been there and which I’d forgotten. Then she suggested that we give our drawing a title. There was only one word that came to mind for me: “Pursuit.” My fellow participants were excited about the discoveries they had made by drawing their life stories on paper, even though each of our lines was different. Some were reminiscent of waves on the ocean; others looked like jagged cliffs. Some of our lines incorporated sharp edges and rolling curves. Interestingly enough, when the strategic planner brought the meeting back to the particulars of short-and long-range goals for our organization, we were a much more cohesive group than we had been before the exercise. We had gotten to know one another’s stories through our lines—and we could better respect the past experience that others brought to the table.

The point of this lesson, as I’ve learned increasingly the more that I’ve recommended this practical tool to others, is that it gives you a fresh perspective on the past. One of the discoveries that I’ve made in looking at my personal line of pursuit was where it showed an avoidance of remembering certain events and where I was holding on unnecessarily to memories.

At that time, the year of homelessness was something that had lived inside of me for too long, even while I’d avoided talking about it. It occurred to me that for years, whenever I went back to San Francisco on business, I’d chosen to stay at the same hotel in a room with a view overlooking Union Square Park, where my son and I had to sleep too many nights. It had been important to remember where I had come from and that I was never going back there again, ever. Meanwhile, I was living with the fear that everything good, joyful, safe, and secure in the life that I’d created for myself and my kids would somehow be snatched away. Somehow, my defense mechanism told me that if I stayed at the hotel and looked down to where I used to be, that would keep me on high alert to prevent such a disaster from happening again. By drawing the line of my life, I finally was able to see that my fear had gotten the better of me.

That discovery was as profound as an exorcism. The next time that I headed for San Francisco, I booked a room at a hotel on a different side of town—and loved it! Will it be my new Bay Area digs? Maybe or maybe not. The gift is that I’m free to choose.

To apply this lesson, I recommend that you take the leap and dare to explore your line. You’ll discover that from a bird’s-eye view, the major turning points and particular chapters will draw your attention to them first and foremost—like a topographical map. You can note your important choices, where you struggled, when you fell down, and the places where you got up again as well as the places where you stayed too long. The discovery available to any of us when we draw the line is that in the midst of what seemed like chaos, instability, or boredom we were able to find our own coherent order, shape, and direction. And we can also see the connection between the lessons that we learned and built upon—or that we failed to learn at our own peril.

You may want to think this one through in your imagination, or do the exercise as we did with the strategic planner. You merely need to trust your treasure mapping skills. It’s a simple exercise. This is your story and you get to tell it. You can choose whether you use pen, pencil, paper, crayons, Magic Markers, or paints and poster board. You can use an Etch A Sketch or graph paper with your compass and protractor.

The reason that I view this line as a map to your treasure is that it lets you see that there is a shape, direction, and purpose in the flow of your life—your story. Each moment in the line of your life is a lesson. Every loop, backslide, dip, elevation, peak, and plateau is reflected there in an event or a memory. Put them all in. And don’t forget to draw the curves!

However you draw your map, the treasure of discovery that awaits you is nothing less than the rhyme and reason to your existence. It’s the discovery of self and the confirmation of three very personal, golden truths: (1) you were meant to be here in this life, to learn, love, and be loved; (2) you are the hero of a meaningful story that is yours alone—a trajectory that has a shape, direction, and purpose; and (3) everything and everyone are in your life for a reason.

My advisory is not to accept these truths on face value. Discover them yourself.

LESSON 14

Whose Child Are You?

KEYWORD: Identity

During my high school years, at a stage of life when the world was sending negative messages about my identity, a particular line of her poetry had allowed me to boost my self-esteem by reciting it whenever in need: “I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal / I cannot be comprehended except by my permission.” The more recent book of Giovanni’s, though not a collection of poetry, deals with the issue of identity as well—but from a very different perspective. Entitled On My Journey Now: Looking at African-American History Through the Spirituals, it also emphasizes the need to study the past—even when it involves confronting the darker days of slavery and powerlessness. Nikki starts out by asking how Africans who were first brought to this country and enslaved here not only managed to survive but ultimately, through their descendants, to thrive. How was it possible, she asks, that people whose existence was totally controlled by insanity were able to stay sane? It had to do with holding on to their power over the only thing they could: their identity. To stay sane, they had to keep that identity separate from their condition of enslavement. How did they know who they were? How could they declare to others and to themselves, “This is who I am”? They did so, she writes, by teaching their children through the spiritual grapevine of songs that “if anybody asks you who you are, tell them you are a child of God.” That message translated in such a way that you would never call yourself a slave or tell anyone that you were a child of slaves or that you belonged to a slave owner. As a child of God, you were not a mistake, or a product of lust or rape, but you were meant to be here, to learn, love, and be loved.

The lesson that comes from asking “Whose child are you?” is therefore a reminder that regardless of the station in life into which you were born and wherever you live in this world, you’re free to choose your place of belonging and to identify your parents in your own terms. Perhaps you think of yourself as a child of God. Or maybe you’re a child of the Universe or of Nature, the Ultimate Divine Mother. The point is that you are here—just as you were meant to be as an essential part of the total design. You absolutely matter to the whole of life.

If your identity has been marred by a false message sent to you in the past, you can reject it as untrue anytime you so choose. You always have the option of asking yourself whose child you are, and answering in a way that validates you. However you do answer, know that in this journey of your life—the only one you’ve got—your identity is as the star who shines above all the rest, as long as you dare to claim that billing.

LESSON 15

Check Out Your Own Version of Genesis

KEYWORD: Forgiveness

Many years ago, before I pursued a career on Wall Street, when I was employed in the field of medical and scientific research, I read a report that said over 50 percent of visits to the doctor are caused by symptoms that seem to have no physical cause. All of the symptoms are real, the medical experts said, but they couldn’t reach a diagnosis. Their thesis was that stress was the real cause—anger, worry, fear, and other emotions that had often been eating away at their patients since early childhood.

It was only recently that I heard about Dr. Dave Clarke’s book, entitled They Can’t Find Anything Wrong! From his studies of stress illness, his position is that the first step to healing undiagnosed symptoms is to return to the past and seek out those early stressors—through the act of remembering. In a majority of cases, his patients experience full recoveries because they are able to understand how their pain started emotionally before it became physical. With understanding, Dr. Clarke observes, some patients are even able to forgive those individuals and experiences that may have been responsible for factors that first triggered the pain.

Granted, not all of us have physical manifestations of stored stress from the past. But it’s also true that until we do something about the baggage of old hurts, resentments, and different forms of anger or guilt that we carry around with us, we’re limiting our experience of happyness in the present.

Then again, when we feel strongly that we’ve been wronged, forgiveness can be a tough hill to climb. How can we begin? In answering that question for myself, I have done much soul-searching, questioning, and reading. On the subject of who was the most hurtful, stressful presence in my childhood, I can easily state that had to be my abusive stepfather, Freddie. Even at a young age, I can remember wondering how he had been allowed to trample on so many of the positive aspects of my early years. And as time went on, I began to ask the question, If everyone is in our lives to teach us something, how could such a negative force as Freddie be there, too? The answer led me to the Bible, to our human origins in the Garden of Eden story.

It was eye-opening to revisit this story that many of us know from various interpretations—from Sunday school, literature, and art—and look at it for the first time as a story that might be personally relevant not just to me but to others. What could it teach us about our human condition and our ability to forgive others and ourselves?

As you may recall, we enter the scriptural Garden of Eden, a paradise, as we meet up with Adam and Eve—who have an abundance of everything they need to be happy. They are loved, protected, and guided by God, who gives them their purpose—to appreciate, cultivate, and care for the Garden. As long as they don’t break the one rule—never eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which will result in death—Adam and Eve can stay in the Garden forever, never to grow old, never to die. But there is a negative force in paradise with them, a being who goads and tempts Eve to break the rule and take a bite of the forbidden fruit. He tells her that she won’t die at all; in fact, if she eats the fruit, it will give her the power of seeing with the eyes of God, to know good and evil. After she goes for it, and Adam follows suit, the consequences for disobedience are certain to be grave.

God bestows his forgiveness on Adam and Eve, but he doesn’t let them off without punishment. He is especially unhappy with Adam, who first tried to cover up what they’d done and then tried to blame it on Eve. When the role of the negative force is revealed, God curses that force to live as a snake and to forever slither on his belly as the lowest of the low; he further curses the snake’s descendants, leaving not even the slightest potential for growth. But God doesn’t curse or disinherit Adam and Eve. For their disobedience and for falling to temptation, their punishment is that instead of staying in the Garden and continuing to eat from the Tree of Life, which makes them immortal, they must leave. They are banished to somewhere “east of Eden”—the world that some of us know as our first neighborhood—where they have to learn to grow their own food from tough, thorny soil, and where they will eventually die. In spite of their mortality and the hardships they will endure, they will retain the God-like resource of knowing good from evil, right from wrong. As to what to do with that knowledge, they are given the power of choice, or free will. That is our human gift.

Their Father/Creator doesn’t split. He’s still there to provide guidance, love, and other miraculous resources when needed. But as to determining their path, their purpose, and how they will pursue their potential—that’s now all on them.

The role of the snake in this story and in ours is really interesting. The lesson for forgiveness, as I see it, is that we can’t blame the negative forces—because that would mean we are stooping to their level. Perhaps you can see in the environment where you were raised how there were influences that could have taken you down—through temptations to respond from your baser instincts—that were at play in your life. Maybe they weren’t embodied in a human being but rather in the circumstances of where and how you grew up.

Again, it wasn’t a stretch for me to identify the snake in my version of Genesis as my stepfather. On the evolutionary scale of things, this guy was definitely subhuman—illiterate, alcoholic, violent, lacking in any moral awareness. In my own anger and fear over a sense of powerlessness, the temptation to respond to his rage with my own—and to become him—was always there. The gift of free will, however, allowed me to choose not to do that. In time, I came to terms with the possibility that he was in my life to teach me exactly what not to be. Was choosing not to be Freddie to prove that I was better than he was? That I could “show him” or “get back” at him for telling me that I was worthless all those years? No. That would have been a judgment rather than a decision to empower myself.

Along those lines, I have been helped in making sense of my own father’s absence in my version of Genesis. My choice was not to go his way, to break the generational cycle. That didn’t make me forget the void and the hurt, but it did allow me to eventually forgive.

If you’ve ever wondered where the stress comes from that might be triggered in the present but is connected to something bigger that happened long ago, checking out your own version of Genesis can yield many insights. If you see the influence of a form of darkness that has limited you, the understanding of its influence on you can pave the way for letting that baggage go.

Let me add the advisory that goes with the act of forgiveness—it takes practice and focus. Again, the operative phrase is that we can forgive even when we don’t forget. Both are separate experiences.

LESSON 16

Who’s Who in Your ‘Hood?

KEYWORD: Trust

From my own experience, I count myself infinitely blessed that my mother’s most important message to me was that “you can.” This was also echoed by other individuals and teachers whose opinions I sought out and believed. Because I knew they loved me and wanted the best for me, I trusted them and their belief in me. The critical part of the equation that I’ve come to understand, however, is the issue of trust.

The lesson taught by Who’s who in your’ hood? is here to shed light on a variety of trust issues that show up in relationships, on the job, and in our daily existence as we strive to get through tough times and thrive in better ones. It’s meant to alert us to the power of past relationships to influence our lives for years to come.

This was a topic that arose in a memorable conversation that took place in Oregon after a book signing one night when two gentlemen, Dan and Jim, stayed behind to ask for advice. Both were high-level managers in the same national retail business, and both had recently been given notice because of store closures. As for future prospects, when it came to looking for new work, each had different trust issues.

Dan had all the belief in the world in his own abilities to adapt to a new career in another setting. At the same time, he was pessimistic about his chances because he didn’t know anyone he could trust to open doors and guide him to opportunities that were becoming fewer and further in between—in his opinion. Jim, on the other hand, had friends, contacts, and strings to pull that he trusted to have him reemployed in no time. But he wasn’t sure he would be able to deliver on their belief in him because deep down, he admitted, he didn’t trust himself to be able to adapt to a different job.

My curiosity was definitely raised. How did the two of them happen to have such different trust issues? In each case, the past and details of the “Who’s who?” in their respective ‘hoods held the clues.

Dan recalled that his most important life mentor—his father—had died on the night that he graduated from high school. Up until then he considered himself a happy-go-lucky person who generally liked everyone else. But without another mentor or supporter to fill the void, he chose to learn to depend on himself. Although he had cultivated wonderful personal relationships, was happily married, and was a very proud father, Dan had always seen himself as the guy who was supposed to make things happen—rather than looking to others to give him a sense of security.

Jim described his upbringing as being as close to an ideal childhood as possible. He had been a star on his basketball team, president of his class, and the “big man on campus” ever since he was in kindergarten. Looking back at his “Who’s who?” he noted several individuals from the past—his parents, teachers, buddies, and girlfriends—who had sent him the message that he was going to be a superstar and most likely to succeed at whatever he did. But deep down, Jim admitted, he wasn’t so sure that he deserved all the praise he was given. “You know what,” he remarked, “high expectations can be a lot of pressure.” He went on to say that many of his adult relationships—on the job or with women—had ended with him thinking or saying, “You just expect too much of me.” His challenge, unlike his friend’s, was to be there as much for himself as his “Who’s who?” was able to do.

As you can see, there are a few different ways to apply the lesson that our earliest relationships are instrumental in how we each deal with trust issues. The most basic application, of course, is the act of looking back and recalling who the messengers were that shaped your belief in yourself and in others—messages that you carry around with you today.

When you do this, you may discover initially—as I did—that some of your first “Who’s who?” might be individuals you haven’t thought about for years, and when you try to bring them to mind, they appear as dim faded photographs. But as you ask yourself certain questions about the messages they sent you, often you’ll capture a memory that brings them into close focus.

I love this straightforward application of asking Who’s who in your ‘hood? because of the simple joy it brings me to remember the richness of the characters who were part of my past. In exploring those relationships of the past and remembering folks whom I loved, resented, missed, or wondered what had become of them, with hindsight I’m able to let go of judgment and just appreciate how they enriched my experience.

If you have trust issues, don’t skip the effort it may require to reflect on your past and the early relationships you developed at home, in school, and wherever you hung out. By consciously choosing to see whose words and actions influenced you—and may still—you may be surprised at how vividly the cast of characters from your movie of the past will step forward with review lessons that you might just need.

The issue of trust is the focus point and keyword for this lesson, but it is also about love. So as you allow yourself to recall your “Who’s who?” do take advantage of the opportunity to better appreciate the love you were given, even when it wasn’t expressed the way that you might have preferred. You can then look back to feel love in return and value everyone who has made your life richer and your journey more interesting.

LESSON 17

The Red or the Yellow Bike?

KEYWORD: Motivation

“What is your why?”

That was a question I first heard a fellow speaker ask when I attended a conference for Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance. Since all that time I’d been asking what and how others pursued their dreams, I now could appreciate this most revealing added question of why. In fact, only a short time later I asked it of an impressive young man introduced to me by a colleague at a nonprofit fund-raiser that we both attended. As he and I got to talking, I learned that he had recently taken over the reins at a private charitable foundation—what he described as his “dream profession.” When I asked, “What is your why?” he wasn’t sure what I meant.

Well, I said, when people say that they’ve attained a dream, I’m curious to know what motivated them to pursue their goal in the first place. For example, I asked, “Why philanthropy? Was that something you always knew you wanted to pursue? As a kid, did you see yourself making a difference in the world one day?” He laughed and admitted none of that had crossed his mind. What he always wanted to do, he explained, was to be the first in his family to go to college. From the time he was young, he had a sense of himself as being different, and the most daring ambition he could set for himself was to one day seek higher education. As for discovering his dream profession, he said that had to do with the question “The red or the yellow bike?” Then he told me his story. He was from a blue-collar background and had grown up in the rural Midwest where the majority of graduating high school students, like his siblings, didn’t go on to college. As a senior in high school, he caught his guidance counselor off guard when he expressed interest in applying to a nearby state university. The guidance counselor discouraged him from doing so, telling him that he should learn a trade instead because he “wasn’t college material.” Now deep down that didn’t sit right with this guy. But it did fire up his motivation to prove otherwise, so that from then on, every choice he made was as if to say, “Says who?” But starting where he was, he decided that if he loved learning, he might as well enroll at the technical trade school to become an electrician. After two years he was happy with the skills he had acquired, enough to wonder, “If I could master a trade so easily, how tough could a bachelor’s degree be?” With part-time work as an electrician, he was able to pay for tuition at the local state university, although he couldn’t afford to buy a car. For transportation, he decided to buy a dependable used bicycle. He shopped around with listings from the want ads and narrowed his choices down to two: a red bike that was nothing special but well made and sturdy; or a yellow bike, which didn’t look as sturdy or well made but was a wonderful yellow color that was eye-catching, not run-of-the-mill or commonplace but exciting in its own way. What made more sense to him, the red or the yellow?

As I listened to the description of the two bikes, I knew right away, he had to go with the yellow. That was the daring, different choice—something to smile about, to make him feel happy riding along in all kinds of weather.

For some people, that might have been a bad decision. If he had chosen the red bike, it wouldn’t have broken down and he would have stuck to the plan of living off campus. Of course, as expected, the yellow bike broke down within a short time of owning it, which forced him to move closer to campus. Finding affordable housing nearby was impossible at that time, so because of the broken-down bike, he had to take the only thing he could find, which turned out to be a room in the housing units for foreign students. If that had never happened, he wouldn’t have eventually discovered his interest in becoming a linguist. The daring, different challenge of pursuing his course work in linguistics was so motivational, he managed to attain a master’s degree, and he then applied and was accepted to a linguistics doctoral program on the West Coast. The selection of the yellow bike had emboldened him forever.

Since his choices were working for him, he figured that he might as well knock off a master’s degree in social anthropology while completing his doctorate in linguistics.

Finding a job proved to be daunting. “To my knowledge,” he said, “there was no position out there that would use both those degrees.” Then, just when he was going to give up and consider a more practical field of study, another chain of events helped him land an opening at a foundation that needed someone who understood how best to provide funding to global programs that were aimed at cultural growth, health, and peace around the world. His degrees were tailor-made for doing that. And none of that would have happened, he says, if he hadn’t chosen the yellow bike.

One of the things that I found most impressive in his story was that he managed to stay connected to the motivating power of his dreams—his why—throughout his teens and early adulthood, a time when all kinds of outside pressure can make many of us second-guess ourselves, our whys, and our choices.

The takeaway from the lesson posed by the question “The red or the yellow bike?” is that if we look back at that time in our own lives between childhood and adulthood, we can often identify what our whys were back then. We can see how they did or didn’t affect the choices we made in terms of career, relationships, education, lifestyle, and other kinds of pursuit.

The memories raised by the question “The red or the yellow bike?” bring to mind as well the reality that there are complicated consequences to face as the result of choosing bold pursuits over options that are safer, more predictable, and less exciting. Even so, if we disregard our true motivation—often more evident in our younger years when we may have been less concerned about security issues—we may miss finding what gives us our own definition of happyness. And when we identify our why, if we honor it, even when we make choices that result in complications, we find the path that we were meant to follow all along.

LESSON 18

Sometimes You Gotta Give Up Christmas

KEYWORD: Independence

While leaving my Chicago office on a cold December day in late 2006, I was approached by a stylish, professionally attired woman who recognized me from a recent media appearance. She introduced herself as a professor who taught at one of the universities, and she went on to say that though she came from a different background—white, affluent, suburban—we had a lot in common. One part of my story in particular had helped her see something she had never known.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I always thought that I was the only one who got robbed of Christmas.” She explained how the holidays had always brought out the worst in her household. In her imagination, every other family in the world had the picture-perfect Christmas—stuffed goose with the trimmings, sugarplums and all. Even now, happily married with children of her own, she planned well in advance to avoid having to make a pretense of joy when her memories told her something else. In fact, whenever winter holidays approached, she would plan a family vacation out of the country—simply in order to graciously turn down invitations to parties.

We were alike in that we had found ways to observe the spirit of the season, attending church or contributing to community services that bring the holidays to those who would go without otherwise. But as for trying to ritualize the Hallmark version that had actually been a horror film in our pasts, we had both come to the conclusion that Sometimes you gotta give up Christmas.

“Anyway, I just wanted to thank you,” she concluded with a laugh, and she used a phrase that I hear often, as she remarked, “I used to think it was just me.” After I thanked her for the acknowledgment, we went our separate ways, and I started to reflect on the disastrous Christmas Day memory in my own past, wondering if perhaps it was time to just get over it. After all, as awful as that day in my late teens had been, it did give me the impetus to leave home and go out to seek my independence. So some good had come of it.

Then again, I didn’t know if I really wanted to be so philosophical when it came to a rotten, hurtful experience that had ruined Christmas for me from then on.

What was ironic to me, all these years later, was that on the day in question I had congratulated myself for opting out of going to the annual holiday family gathering that I knew would end up with drinking, demeaning language, yelling, and then knock-down, drag-out fighting. Instead, I was going to take advantage of our empty house, enjoy a long hot Christmas Day bath, and then take my girlfriend out on a date. Too lucky to be that lucky, I should have known that my stepfather would not have allowed me to celebrate on my own terms. Not that I could have anticipated Freddie’s sudden return home or the sight of him bursting into the bathroom, with murder in his eyes, or that he would put me out of the house at the end of a shotgun barrel. Standing there stark naked on the freezing porch in broad daylight as a kid passed by and stared—obviously not knowing what to say except “Merry Christmas, mister”—I came to a crossroads. Time to give it up and say to myself, “Never again.” Most likely, you, too, can recall those times in your past when you faced a crossroads and made a decision to change the circumstances of your life—much to the contrary of what others expected of you. Whatever it was that prompted your decision may not be as important as the fact that you came to it on your own. If this is the case for you, it may be worth your while to look back and remember those choices made at crossroads that perhaps you could put to use in the present—especially if changing your life for the better is on your current wish list.

For me, this life lesson resulted in my independence, which came as the result of making up my mind as to when too much is too much.

As you look back at the time in your life when you were first setting out for adulthood, it’s valuable to remember the independent decisions you made, right or wrong, and how they taught you lessons in terms of what I call the three As. Those are the three additional keywords that go along with independence—authority, authenticity, and autonomy. These three capacities are some of the most empowering resources you can seek: (1) to know yourself (authority), (2) to be yourself (authenticity), and (3) to choose for yourself (autonomy).

The advisory that comes with this lesson is that independence allows you to change your mind over time. You can reject a lousy childhood or a painful memory and choose not to allow it to be part of your ongoing journey. You can also reclaim your right to joy, camaraderie, and community by creating the celebrations and the life you truly desire. Simply stated: independence gives you those options.

LESSON 19

No Test, No Testimony

KEYWORD: Courage

Whenever I’m asked how it was that my son and I became homeless, I opt for the short version. I start to explain the particulars of the breakup of my relationship with my son’s mother, how I was sent to the state penitentiary for ten days on parking tickets (yep, parking tickets!), and how I was then released to find my family and our belongings gone without a trace. It was in the midst of desperately trying to locate my son that I moved into a low-rent boardinghouse, which was all that I could afford on my entry-level stockbroker trainee position, before finally my ex showed up with my son one night and said, “Here he is.” Because the boardinghouse strictly forbade children, we were immediately, effectively homeless. From there, as the situation grew more complicated, to make the story shorter, I usually just summarize the rest by saying, “Life happens.” The majority of the correspondence that I receive comes from people of all ages who’ve had their own experience of “Life happens.” All of our circumstances vary dramatically, but what we have in common in our ordeals is suddenly having to pass the hardest test of all—one that brings us face-to-face with our fears, lets us know who we are, and reveals whether we have the courage to stand on faith at the most uncertain points.

We can refer to those chapters of our lives as rites of passage that take us from shaky, uncertain ground to finding our firmament. This was the experience of a woman I met at a book signing in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who described her situation as hopeful but also one that was testing her on every level. A single working mother with two children, she had undertaken a dream to go to her “Promised Land” as an entrepreneur. Her current pursuit was to attain the means to open up a restaurant in Santa Fe.

Her observation was that you never know what you can accomplish until you’re challenged to find out. “I never planned on a career,” she noted. “I wanted to be home with my children, that was my dream.” When things didn’t work out in her marriage, the rug was pulled out from under her. “Twenty-nine years old and I didn’t know how to do anything on my own. I was lost in the wilderness.” Her version of “Life happens” had taught her what she was made of, had helped her find her faith, and gave her courage that she didn’t know she had. Now she was on her way to opening up a restaurant in Santa Fe.

Her story stayed with me and got me to thinking about how a lot of us come, for different reasons, to turning points in our lives where we can stay stuck in the same place or we can seek deliverance, a departure, or an exodus from where we are to the destination we determine. Given the hardships many folks are encountering, including the exploding crisis of white-collar homelessness that I knew all too well, it seems that we’re all being tested, and we could all use an added boost of courage, maybe now more than ever.

Then again, as Momma used to say whenever courage was needed and faith was being tested, “No test, no testimony.” This was biblically inspired, no doubt, but drawn from the many trials she herself had faced. And she always framed it for me in secular language that I could understand and apply; that is, if you ain’t been tested, you got nothing to say, nothing to add of value to the conversation.

So I understood how the journey to start a new life in Santa Fe that the woman described was a test of faith and courage. Her comments also motivated me to take a closer look at the actual book of Exodus.

There are many ways to interpret the metaphor of the exile into slavery, God’s deliverance of his people out of bondage, and then the journey of having to travel on foot for the next forty years before being able to cross the river Jordan into Canaan, the Promised Land. For African Americans, that is the story of deliverance out of four hundred years of slavery.

We can still stand on the shoulders of the faith that brought us this far and know that if God didn’t give up on us, how can we give up on ourselves? That’s the other lesson of Exodus that I have tried to incorporate into my search for light, even in darkness, the essential pursuit of happyness.

Yes, a year of homelessness with a baby on my back lets me testify to that. Goodness and God showed up in bold and subtle ways. We were blessed by everyone from Glide Memorial Church with spiritual nourishment and actual soul food when we were hungry, given without judgment. There was the opportunity of this career that I was pursuing and belief that I was making headway. There were people who quietly supported us without looking for their payback, Underground Railroad style. And there was even a bathroom at a transit station where we could sleep and be safe.

Toward the end, when it started to become dark inside of me, when the faith that had led me and fueled me was being the most severely tested, I found resources that I didn’t know I had, ones that I still draw from every day.

Struggle is in our genes. We are here on this earth to choose to journey from one place to a better one. The Bible doesn’t tell us that, but it shows us that it’s all been done before, by others we can follow, and will be done again by those to follow us. Struggle was not invented just for me or you or any of us. We either go forward in the struggle, or we give in to our fear.

With courage we can pass the test of our Exodus and find our faith that overcomes fear and empowers us to offer testimony.

As you recall what may be your Exodus, look at how far you’ve come and take courage. Now allow yourself to be your own Moses, and lead on.