تمرین هفتم

THE SEVENTH PRACTICE

The Way Things Are

The practice in this chapter is to be present to the way things are, including our feelings about the way things are. This practice can help us clarify the next step that will take us in the direction we say we want to go.

The calculating self is threatened by such an attempt: “Why hang around and feel like a sucker?” it asks.

But the central self expands and develops with each new experience:

“What is here now?” it asks, and then,

“What else is here now?”

Being present to the way things are is not the same as accepting things as they are in the resigned way of the cow. It doesn’t mean you should drown out your negative feelings or pretend you like what you really can’t stand. It doesn’t mean you should work to achieve some “higher plane of existence” so you can “transcend negativity.” It simply means, being present without resistance: being present to what is happening and present to your reactions, no matter how intense.

Say, for instance, you are on your annual winter vacation in Florida, and rain is pouring down steadily. Surely you won’t like it. You came here expecting sun and warmth, rounds of golf, and lots of time on the beach. The question is, can you be with the whole thing, the rain and your feelings about the rain? If you cannot, you might spend entire days bracing against the truth, complaining how unfair it is, how nobody warned you about the weather patterns, how the hotel ought to refund your money because the brochure showed sunny skies, how wrong your spouse was not to take your advice to go to the resort in Tucson. You might find yourself railing at the heavens, asking why you, personally, are being punished. You would be stuck—and unable to go on from there.

However, there is another choice: letting the rain be, without fighting it. Merely exchanging an and for a but may do the trick: We are in Florida for our winter vacation, AND it’s raining. This isn’t what we planned; it’s very disappointing. If we wanted rain at this time of year, we would have visited our friends in Seattle. AND, this is the way things are.

Presence without resistance: you are now free to turn to the question, “What do we want to do from here?” Then all sorts of pathways begin to appear: the possibility of resting; having the best food, sex, reading, or conversation; going to the movies or walking in the rain; or catching the next flight to Tucson.

Indeed, the capacity to be present to everything that is happening, without resistance, creates possibility. It creates possibility in the same way that, if you are far-sighted, finding your glasses revives your ability to read or remove a splinter from a child’s finger. At last you can see. You can leave behind the struggle to come to terms with what is in front of you, and move on.

A DOWNHILL CHALLENGE

One year I went alone on a three-day ski trip, with a plan to concentrate entirely on improving my skiing. On my first run down the mountain, I slipped and fell on a patch of ice. From then on I became vigilant, tensing up in resistance whenever I spotted ice, and, unfortunately, there was plenty of it. I was about to abandon the project and come back some other time when real skiing was to be had, when suddenly it occurred to me that I had been operating under the assumption that real skiing is skiing on snow. I laughed with what Ben often refers to as “cosmic laughter,” the laughter that comes from the surprise and delight of seeing the obvious. If I was going to be a New England skier, I had better include ice in my definition of skiing! I redrew the box in my mind, so that now I had it that skiing is skiing on snow and ice. As I started down the next run, my physical self coordinated easily with my new way of thinking. I welcomed the ice. As every skier knows, resistance to ice can take you on quite a painful downward slide, whereas traversing ice as though it is a friendly surface will usually deliver you gracefully to the other side.

MISTAKES CAN BE like ice. If we resist them, we may keep on slipping into a posture of defeat. If we include mistakes in our definition of performance, we are likely to glide through them and appreciate the beauty of the longer run.

MUSIC’S UPHILL GLORY

I’ll never forget my surprise when the first horn player of the Boston Philharmonic came to me after a performance of one of the most taxing of Mahler’s symphonies in which he had played a magnificent rendition of the incredibly demanding solo horn part. “I’m so sorry,” he said. For a moment I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. I was struck that his whole appearance seemed dejected and apologetic. Finally I registered that what had caused his deflation was the fact that he had flubbed two admittedly very exposed high notes in the course of one of his big solo passages. Perhaps his mistake might have seemed an irritant to some in a recording heard over and over again, but in the context of an impassioned performance lasting nearly ninety minutes, it was hardly significant. In fact, the all-out ardor of his playing that had led to his mistake had been a major contributor to this performance’s extraordinary vitality.

So when Mahler wrote difficult passages for particular instruments, like the high-flying “Frère Jacques” tune for solo double bass in the third movement of the First Symphony, he was almost certainly conveying, musically, the sense of vulnerability and risk he saw as an integral part of life. For the orchestra and the conductor, playing Mahler’s symphonies means taking huge risks with ensemble, expression, and technique. We will not convey the sense of the music if we are in perfect technical control, so in a sense a very good player has to try harder in these passages than someone for whom they would be a strain, technically. Stravinsky, a composer whom we tend to think of as rather objective and “cool,” once turned down a bassoon player because he was too good to render the perilous opening to The Rite of Spring. This heart-stopping moment, conveying the first crack in the cold grip of the Russian winter, can only be truly represented if the player has to strain every fiber of his technical resources to accomplish it. A bassoon player for whom it was easy would miss the expressive point. And when told by a violinist that a difficult passage in the violin concerto was virtually unplayable, Stravinsky is supposed to have said: “I don’t want the sound of someone playing this passage, I want the sound of someone trying to play it!” This attitude is difficult to maintain in our competitive culture where so much attention is given to mistakes and criticism that the voice of the soul is literally interrupted. The risk the music invites us to take becomes a joyous adventure only when we stretch beyond our known capacities, while gladly affirming that we may fail. And if we make a mistake, we can mentally raise our arms and say, “How fascinating!” and reroute our attention to the higher purpose at hand.

SOME DISTINCTIONS

The practice of being with the way things are calls upon us to distinguish between our assumptions, our feelings, and the facts—that is, what has happened or what is happening. These are not easy distinctions to make considering the ongoing inventive power of perception. The following are applications of the practice in some contexts where we may have difficulty distinguishing our thoughts and feelings about events from the events themselves.

Being with the Way Things Are by Clearing “Shoulds”

When we dislike a situation, we tend to put all our attention on how things should be rather than how they are. How many times have we addressed a “should-be” child and found our words quite irrelevant to the child we’ve got? The stakes really go up when the issue is not rain or a child’s whine, but hunger, tyranny, or global warming. When our attention is primarily directed to how wrong things are, we lose our power to act effectively. We may have difficulty understanding the total context, discussing what to do next, or we may overlook the people who “should not have done what they did” as we think about a solution.

Being with the Way Things Are by Closing the Exits: Escape, Denial, and Blame Some feelings are just plain unpleasant, like being too cold or having a stomachache. Others, like grief or anguish or rage, seem so intense they threaten to overwhelm us, and we look for an exit. We resist the feelings, or turn our backs on the situation, or foist the blame and the responsibility onto others. Closing the exits means staying with the feelings, whatever they are. It means letting them run their course, as a storm sweeps overhead showering rain and thunder, only to be followed by clear patches of blue.

Sometimes the capacity to be present without resistance eludes even the most loving parents when their children are troubled. They may not be able to bear their children’s pain, stand close enough to comfort them, or even listen to their words. But feelings can be likened to muscles—the more intensively you stay with the exercise, closing the door on escape, the more emotional heavy lifting you can do. Then you become that much more of a player in your field of endeavor.

Being with the Way Things Are by Clearing Judgments

The rain in Florida may be bad for us and good for the citrus crop. A canceled flight may wreck our schedule and bring us face to face with our future spouse in the airport lounge. A forest fire may seem to destroy an ecosystem in the short term, yet renew it with vigor for the long term. When a splendid osprey eats a beautiful fish, it is neither good nor bad. Or, it’s good for the osprey and bad for the fish. Nature makes no judgment. Humans do. And while our willingness to distinguish good and evil may be one of our most enhancing attributes, it is important to realize that “good” and “bad” are categories we impose on the world—they are not of the world itself.

A man goes to see his rabbi. “Rabbi,” he asks, “you told us a story—something to do with praise?” The rabbi responds, “Yes, it is thus: when you get some good news, you thank the Lord, and when you get some bad news, you praise the Lord.” “Of course,” replies the man, “I should have remembered. But Rabbi, how do you actually know which is the good news and which is the bad news?” The rabbi smiles. “You are wise, my son. So just to be on the safe side, always thank the Lord.” Being with the Way Things Are by Distinguishing Physical from Conceptual Reality Among all the complexities that keep us from being present to things the way they are, one of the most potent is the confusion between physical reality and abstractions—creations of the mind and tongue. Language is replete with a variety of “things” that have no existence in time and space but seem as real to us as anything we own—“justice,” for instance, or “aesthetics,” or “zero.” Using these concepts, we can accomplish what we could not otherwise. They are tools that allow us to count, to learn from others, to establish guidelines for behavior. They permit us to traffic with the future and the past. It is important to keep in mind, however, that these “things” refer only indirectly to phenomena in the world. What they point to is not made up of matter. These abstractions are purely inventions of language.

The nature of abstractions is that they have a lasting existence exempt from the contingencies of time and place. The oft-heard lament of women in their thirties seeking marriage, “there are no men,” does not refer to tonight in Boston. An abstraction, such as destiny, that is thought up in a moment of resistance to passing conditions has the power to narrow down our lives. Two stormy Florida vacations can easily be turned into a permanent cloud of bad karma that follows one whenever fun is in the offing, putting a damper on the brightest day. So this part of the practice of being with the way things are is to separate our conclusions about events from our description of the events themselves, until possibility opens up.

THE WALL

ROZ: A family came to do some work with me at the request of their sixteen-year-old son. Stress in their household had risen to such a level that the normally reticent young man had actually suggested therapy for himself and his parents. The father had then obtained the referral from his medical doctor. During the first visit, the distraught father told me earnestly, “He doesn’t communicate with us; he’s put up an impenetrable wall that excludes us from his life.” How odd for this man to put it in those terms, I thought, given the fact that his son had been the one to initiate the meeting.

Both parents turned toward their son and waited. The boy said nothing. “You see?” said his father, and went on to elaborate the image; the boy had closeted himself, and the father wanted more of something—more information, more contact.

Now, this is such a common way of speaking that its inventive power can easily pass us by unnoticed. The father spoke about a barrier to communication that he said the boy had created, but of course it only appeared when the father called it up. By the alchemy of language, the four people in the room were instantly transfigured into four people and a wall. The more the father described it, the more the wall increased in density, and the more invisible the boy grew behind it. Taking the boy’s silence as further evidence of the barrier, the father seemed unaware that he hadn’t made any request of his son or addressed him at all. This well-intentioned man did not realize that, by insisting on there being a wall between them, he had built something more solid than if he had taken mortar and brick and erected an unscalable rampart to divide them. Every bit of communication from then on related to the “wall“; every silence was evidence of its enduring presence.

How life-giving a tiny shift in speaking could become. Imagine this conversation: “Are you willing to pretend that there is a wall between us?” the father asks, and, if the boy agrees, they dismantle the wall in play, where it belongs. Perhaps the young man suggests another metaphor, that he feels “invisible” to his parents. Startled, the adults begin to put their attention on the boy-in-the-flesh in the room with them, with whom real relationship can grow. Imagine that the father begins a conversation with, “Son, you’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” or “Son, what about this whole situation makes you the most angry?” or “Son, I’m about to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before.” The boy looks up at his father, and they have taken their first steps on a journey of possibility.

Abstractions that we unwittingly treat as physical reality tend to block us from seeing the way things are, and therefore reduce our power to accomplish what we say we want.

DOWNWARD SPIRAL TALK

In the last chapter, we set up a model distinguishing two selves: the calculating self and the central self. When we are our calculating selves, we struggle onward and upward like contestants in an obstacle course, riveting our attention on the “barriers” we see in our way. Strengthening the concept of obstacles with metaphors, we talk about “walls” and “roadblocks,” their height and prevalence, and what it will take to overcome them. This is downward spiral talk, and it is part and parcel of the effort to climb the ladder and arrive at the top.

The catchphrase downward spiral talk stands for a resigned way of speaking that excludes possibility. “The little old ladies who support classical music are all dying out,” the conversation goes in downward spiral mode. “Our culture has become totally commercialized, and no one wants to fund the arts.” “Nowadays school children are only interested in popular music—audiences for classical music are rapidly diminishing; clearly it is a dying art.” Downward spiral talk is based on the fear that we will be stopped in our tracks and fall short in the race, and it is wholly reactive to circumstances, circumstances that appear to be wrong, problematic, and in need of fixing. Every industry or profession has its own version of downward spiral talk, as does every relationship. Focusing on the abstraction of scarcity, downward spiral talk creates an unassailable story about the limits to what is possible, and tells us compellingly how things are going from bad to worse.

Why does it spiral downward, why do things tend to look more and more hopeless? For the same reason that red Dodge pickups seem to proliferate on the highways as soon as you buy one and that pregnant women appear out of nowhere approximately eight months before your baby is due. The more attention you shine on a particular subject, the more evidence of it will grow. Attention is like light and air and water. Shine attention on obstacles and problems and they multiply lavishly.

The practice of the way things are is a reality check on the runaway imagination of the calculating self. It’s like the world-weary policeman saying, “Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts.” Radiating possibility begins with things as they are and highlights open spaces, the pathways leading out from here.

Then the obstacles are simply present conditions—they are merely what has happened or is happening. The father in our story might say, “I have not inquired about my son’s life, and he is not volunteering any information,” and he would be describing present conditions in the family. He might add: “I am afraid I don’t know the right questions to ask, and it irritates me that he doesn’t come to me to talk,” and he would still be describing the way things are. The father would then be able to see the obvious: that sharing something of himself with his son, or asking some interested questions, would be a likely next step toward greater rapport.

So, too, the chairman of the orchestra board might be satisfied with the description, “There were 800 people in attendance for the March 14th concert and 700 for the program on April 10th,” without going on to create a trend. For “diminishing audiences,” like bogeymen, are never anywhere to be found except in someone’s story. You can shake hands, however, with the 700 people who attended the April concert, and while you’re at it, pass out fliers and say, “Can’t wait to see you at the next event!”

SPEAKING IN POSSIBILITY

Often, the person in the group who articulates the possible is dismissed as a dreamer or as a Pollyanna persisting in a simplistic “glass half-full” kind of optimism. The naysayers pride themselves on their supposed realism. However, it is actually the people who see the glass as “half-empty” who are the ones wedded to a fiction, for “emptiness” and “lack,” like the “wall,” are abstractions of the mind, whereas “half-full” is a measure of the physical reality under discussion. The so-called optimist, then, is the only one attending to real things, the only one describing a substance that is actually in the glass.

The practice of being with the way things are can break the unseen grip of abstractions created as a hedge against danger in a world of survival, and allow us to make conscious distinctions that take us into the realm of possibility—dreams, for instance, and visions. Imagine if we were to faithfully whisper the immortal words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “I have a dream …,” as a preface to our every next remark. Speaking in possibility springs from the appreciation that what we say creates a reality; how we define things sets a framework for life to unfold.

A practice of this chapter and of the book as a whole is to distinguish between talk in the downward spiral and conversations for possibility. The question one asks is: art

ROZ: “I would do the kind of work that Jane Goodall does, but I couldn’t face the horrors she sees everyday,” my daughter said as we walked together on a stony beach. Nothing about the moment could have been more perfect: the balmy fragrance of the air, the bright and warming sunlight, seabirds calling from cove to rocky point, while a slight breeze caused the bluest of blues to sparkle with light. It’s easy enough to be fully and passionately present on a rare day in Maine, when one is free of obligations and nothing is at stake. But how can we stand to be present in the face of pain, loss, or disappointments?

I had shared with my daughter, Alexandra, my reaction to hearing Jane Goodall speak at the State of the World Forum in San Francisco. Renowned for her research on chimpanzees in the wild, she has established sanctuaries in Tanzania and in other parts of Africa by working with the people of the areas to support themselves in harmony with the biologically diverse environment. Governments around the world now fund her brainchild, Roots and Shoots, which educates and helps children in at least fifty countries to care for the ecosystem. As she addressed the San Francisco assembly, her quiet speaking captivated the room, as it has so many heads of state. We heard about it all—the poaching, the carnage, the degradations of nature, the destruction of the habitat—but nothing she said stood as a barrier to possibility. Her compassionate gaze encompassed it all, the good and the bad, the painful outrages and the joyous signs of life. Never did she intimate that anything that had happened should have happened differently, not a hint of blame escaped her lips, while she related tales that were torturous for most of us. She simply told the whole story, and showed us the pathways leading out from where we are, while her face expressed only compassion and love. Jane Goodall’s transcendent power was rooted in being present, without resistance, to the world just as it is.

BEING WITH the way things are calls for an expansion of ourselves. We start from what is, not from what should be; we encompass contradictions, painful feelings, fears, and imaginings, and—without fleeing, blaming, or attempting correction—we learn to soar, like the far-seeing hawk, over the whole landscape. The practice of being with the way things are allows us to alight in a place of openness, where “the truth” readies us for the next step, and the sky opens up.