تمرین دوازدهم

THE TWELFTH PRACTICE

Telling the WE Story

BEN: When I was nearing the end of my first sojourn in America on a limited visa, I set up a program that allowed me to take a group of American high school students back to England to study music for a year. Each of their high school principals in the United States had miraculously agreed to give them a full year’s credit for the time spent there. I rented a house for them near Hampstead Heath in London, and instituted a complete course of study that included music, art, philosophy, and English. I arranged each week for a scholar to come to a dinner cooked by the students, to talk to them about his or her particular field.

On one occasion I invited my father, Walter Zander, who had devoted a lifetime to thinking and writing about conflict, especially the conflict between Jews and Arabs. By candlelight over a dinner into which the students had put extra care, he began by describing the whole sweep of Jewish history reaching back to the days of Abraham. He poured his passion into the tale—the great biblical stories, the medieval ages, the accomplishments in the arts and sciences, the story of the Diaspora and the tragedy of the Holocaust. He brought the whole saga down to rest on the tiny sliver of land called Palestine in 1947, the year before the land was partitioned between Arabs and Jews so that the Jews could have a homeland.

Then he went back and narrated the whole sweep of the history of the Arab people. He again started with Abraham, the acknowledged ancestor of the Arabs as well as of the Jews. He spoke of Arabic sciences and learning, the magnificent library at Alexandria, the great artistic achievements—the tapestries and the architecture, the music and the literature, the folkloric Tales of the Arabian Nights. Above all he spoke of the legendary courtesy of the Arab people.

What was most striking was that he seemed to speak with equal enthusiasm whether he was speaking about the Jews or the Arabs. When he brought the great four-thousand-year saga of the Arab people down to the same little sliver of land called Palestine in the year 1947, one of the students exclaimed, “What a wonderful opportunity! What a privilege for both those peoples to share that land and that history!” Imagine if this sentiment had been the one to guide Arab and Jewish relations in the Middle East since 1947.

MORE OFTEN THAN NOT history is a record of conflict between an Us and a Them. We see this pattern expressed across a broad spectrum: nation to nation, among political parties, between labor and management, and in the most intimate realms of our lives. What framework will transform us AND those whose claims on resources, territory, and the “truth” are irreconcilable with ours? What can we invent that will take us from an entrenched posture of hostility to one of enthusiasm and deep regard?

To begin the inquiry, we have distinguished a new entity that personifies the “togetherness” of you and me and others. This entity, the WE, can be found among any two people, in any community or organization, and it can be thought of, in poetic terms, as a melody running through the people of the earth. It emerges in the way music emerges from individual notes when a phrase is played as one long line, in the way a landscape coalesces out of the multicolored strokes of an Impressionist painting when you get some distance, and in the way a “family” comes into being when a first child is born. The WE appears when, for the moment, we set aside the story of fear, competition, and struggle, and tell its story.

The WE story defines a human being in a specific way: It says we are our central selves seeking to contribute, naturally engaged, forever in a dance with each other. It points to relationship rather than to individuals, to communication patterns, gestures, and movement rather than to discrete objects and identities. It attests to the in-between. Like the particle-and-wave nature of light, the WE is both a living entity and a long line of development unfolding. This new being, the WE of us, comes into view as we look for it—the vital entity of our company, or community, or group of two. Then the protagonist of our story, the entity called WE, steps forward and takes on a life of its own.

By telling the WE story, an individual becomes a conduit for this new inclusive entity, wearing its eyes and ears, feeling its heart, thinking its thoughts, inquiring into what is best for US. This practice points the way to a kind of leadership based not on qualifications earned in the field of battle, but on the courage to speak on behalf of all people and for the long line of human possibility.

The steps to the WE practice are these:

1. Tell the WE story—the story of the unseen threads that connect us all, the story of possibility.

2. Listen and look for the emerging entity.

3. Ask: “What do WE want to have happen here?”

“What’s best for US?”—all of each of us, and all of all of us.

“What’s OUR next step?”

THE ALCHEMY OF WE

ROZ: One might think that a treatment facility for schizophrenic and autistic children would be as unlikely a setting as one could imagine for the WE to emerge, but it was there in the Master’s Children’s Center in New York City in the late 1960s where I first saw it clearly. One of my patients was a strange and poetic nine-year-old named Victoria Nash. At any moment this child might strike a pose and hold it for hours until someone recognized her gesture and interpreted the reference; for instance, “Oh, you are Giselle and you are feeling sad!” At the opening of this vignette, as so often, she was twirling on one foot.

“Go to the store!” she said, addressing me imperiously while gazing off into the distance. “Go to the store and get me what I want.” I stifled a smile, and did proper homage to the solemn nature of the request. “Yes, your majesty,” I replied, bowing. I left her in the room to wait for me and crossed the street to the little corner store. I was enjoying the game, particularly because I prided myself on my sensitivity in finding the right things for people. This would solidify our relationship, I thought, wearing my therapist hat and taking myself quite seriously. I perused the shelves. What would she want? Something to read? No. Something sweet? She wasn’t a junk food sort of girl. A fat can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew arrested my eye, momentarily. Then my gaze roamed over the sodas and juices in the refrigerated section and returned to the canned foods. I selected the Dinty Moore.

In the room with the blue shag rug and the simple white curtains, Victoria stood poised, her head cocked, staring at the paper bag in my hand. Then all at once I realized, “I am at her mercy. She is about to invent us; she has that power, and this is her game. This is not about me and my talent for choosing gifts; it isn’t even about my purchase. This is about US.” And I saw the whole thing, the story of human connection that had been unfolding while I had narrowed down my sights to matters of personal pride. I realized we were at a critical point in the narrative. She was going to declare who we were, whether we were together or miles apart. Courageously I faced her. Bravely she faced me back. She took the bag, opened it carefully, and extracted the can of Dinty Moore. “Oh, Miss Stone,” she said, relief suffusing her face. “How did you know this is exactly what I wanted?” Victoria chose to tell OUR story, the story of sufficiency and connection, yet she might, perhaps more easily, have told a story about her disappointment over my shortcomings. It is an ongoing choice for all of us—when a lover neglects to call, a colleague lets us down, or someone surpasses us, we can choose to tell the story of the WE or the story of the Other.

USUALLY WHAT WE MEAN by the pronoun “we” is “you-plus-I,” and so the questions “What shall we do?” or “What will work for us?” generally refer to a compromise between what you want and what I want. The assumption is that people are singular, constant beings whose stated desires are for all time. So it follows that some will win and some will lose, and neither are likely to get all they want. The resulting competition structures us in two ways: It encourages us to exaggerate our positions and keep back some of the truth, and it pushes us into offensive and defensive positions, so that we are all too soon handing out ultimatums and guarding our turf.

The practice of the WE offers an approach to conflict based on a different premise. It assumes there are no fixed wants nor static desires, while everything each of us thinks and feels has a place in the dialogue.

Here are some examples contrasting the I/You approach and the WE approach: The I/You approach:

He says, “Give me a raise or I’m quitting my job.”

His employer passes the buck, or tries to appease him, or lies to him, or tries to get him to put off acting on his decision.

Compare this to the WE approach, in which the assumption is that the entity WE, the in-between, is forever evolving, forever in motion. Often just the use of the word we can shift the direction things takes.

The WE approach:

He says, “We’re apparently both happy with my work, and I sense our loyalty is mutual. Yet this salary doesn’t support the other commitments in my life. What do WE want to have happen here? How can WE make the whole thing work?” Here is another I/You conversation:

She says, “Get that woman out of your life or I will leave this marriage.” He lies to her, or tries to appease her, or tries to get her to change her mind to give him more time.

And the WE approach:

She says, “I am miserable with this situation, and I believe you are too. I’m so angry I don’t know what to do. And I love you. What do WE want to have happen here? What’s best for US?” The practice of the WE gives us a method for reclaiming “The Other” as one of us.

Traditional methods of resolving conflict, all the I/You approaches, tend to increase the level of discord because they attempt to satisfy the dichotomous positions people take, rather than providing the means for people to broaden their desires. I/You methods deprive people of the opportunity to wish inclusively. They do not give people the chance to want what the story of the WE says we are thirsting for: connecting to others through our dreams and visions.

While the WE practice can enhance any aspect of your life, it also poses a risk. It is not a technique for arriving at a decision based on known quantities; it’s an integrative process that yields the next step. It asks you to trust that the evolution you set in motion will serve you over the long line. What happens after that is not in your control, but springs spontaneously from the WE itself.

THAT WHICH WAS LOST IS FOUND

ROZ: My sister and I became guarded with each other in the weeks and months after our mother died. I don’t think either of us had a handle on what it was about, but I, in my characteristic way, was eager to roll up my sleeves and iron out some issues with her. She, less given to argument, preferred to keep her distance. Many is the time I drove through the streets of Boston presenting my case in the most cogent terms to a full courtroom just beyond the dashboard, while she was safely closeted a state away.

My birthday came and went and still we had not managed to get together; of course I felt all the more put upon. Finally I had the grace to ask myself, “What’s happening here?” and I caught a glimpse of the in-between. All the energy I had been expending to shape a persuasive argument was actually propelling us apart. And I missed her—acutely. I thought that if I could just see her we surely could find some solutions. So I called her, and invited myself to her house for breakfast, and got up in the dark and was down in Connecticut by seven. There in the kitchen in her nightgown I found her, looking like my favorite sister in all the world.

We talked gaily while we drank black Italian coffee, and then we took a long morning walk down the leafy dirt roads of Ashford, Connecticut, while her chocolate Lab, Chloe, ran ahead and came back, ran ahead and came back, in long arcs of perpetual motion.

What did we talk about? The architecture, and the countryside, and the cats that Chloe was eager to visit at the farm ahead. We revisited scenes featuring our hilarious mother. We talked about my work, and about a paper she was about to present. My “case” never came up; it must have gotten lost somewhere along that wooded road because by the time I got in the car—my courtroom, my favorable jury—it was no longer on the docket.

Did we resolve the issues? Obviously not, but the issues themselves are rarely what they seem, no matter what pains are taken to verify the scoreboard. We walked together, moved our arms, became joyous in the sunlight, and breathed in the morning. At that moment there were no barriers between us. And from that place, I felt our differences could easily be spoken.

My disagreements with my sister were but blips on our screen compared to the hostilities individuals and nations are capable of when anger, fear, and the sense of injustice are allowed to develop unchecked. “Putting things aside” then becomes quite a different matter. At the apex of desperation and rage, we need a new invention to see us through.

NO HUMAN ENEMY

Just such a device was forged out of an unusual interaction with a couple in my psychotherapy practice, a couple on the verge of separation. The husband, who had resisted coming to the session in the first place, had retreated to the farthest corner of the office, albeit only a few feet away. His wife was in a rage at him for his habit of withdrawing, just as he was doing then, and for leaving her alone too often. As the tension built, she pleaded with him and accused him and then she literally howled at him: “YOU DON’T LOVE ME!” I heard my own voice shouting back at her “Who could love you when you act like this?” and realized that I had hurled myself between them. This was pretty terrifying for me—never mind what they must have felt. I was standing a foot from the woman’s face, the face of someone with whom I had worked intimately and whom I knew very well, saying the most untherapeutic thing imaginable. I was truly out of the boat. In a split second of fear I made eye contact with her, and I suddenly caught sight of her central self.

“But it’s not you speaking,” I blurted out. “It is something else: Revenge. Revenge is speaking in your voice. It’s a creature, sitting on your shoulder, and it’s going to get him no matter what, even if it has to destroy you in the process.” And the creature appeared, right there on her shoulder, in front of our collective mind’s eye.

Suddenly and miraculously I wasn’t angry and I wasn’t trapped, and our sense of connection was completely restored. Moreover a whole new set of phenomena appeared. I saw how much harder it was on the woman to have to manage this Thing than it was on the rest of us. I saw the vicious circle in which she would have to blame her husband for her outrageous behavior just to keep her sanity, while the Revenge Creature celebrated its victory. It was clear to me that It had come into being and split off from her at some early age and had not evolved since then by an inch or an ounce. And, I knew it was all a metaphor.

The man moved out of his corner and stood by his wife. Things came into view, one after another. “It’s not going to enjoy being discovered,” I said. “It’s scheming right now to find new hiding places so it can make use of you again to get him.” The woman turned to her husband: “What she is saying is true. I hate being this way!” And he grasped it completely by the tone in her voice. She plaintively asked me how she could get rid of the Thing.

I felt confident in telling her she would not be able to do away with it, as though I were an expert on Revenge Creatures; but in fact, once it was distinguished, I knew exactly how it would behave. I knew that if she resisted, it would gain in strength, and if she brought it to the light of day, it would lose its power. “Just keep calling it by name,” I told her, “assume it’s lurking somewhere.” Ask yourself, “What’s the Creature doing now?” Here was an apparition—part invention and part discovery—that removed the barriers between us and allowed for a flow of compassion, no matter how badly we had behaved. It meant that wholeheartedness between people was always possible. I saw that if we describe revenge, greed, pride, fear, and righteousness as the villains—and people as the hope—we will come together to create possibility. We don’t have to restrict ourselves, and we don’t have to compromise. With our inventive powers, we can be passionately for each other and for the whole living world around us. We need never name a human being as the enemy.

IN OUR WORLD, terrorism is one of the ultimate expressions of revenge, breaking down trust and community. How do we tell the WE story in the face of this seemingly inevitable process? How might the practice of the WE proceed in a community violated by the acts of terrorists?

The practitioner of the WE starts by generating, for himself, the WE story: that people are their central selves, that communities are always seeking to evolve toward integration, that the enemy to conquer is never a human being. He encourages the expression of each thing that is pressing to be said in the group, not as a problem that must be resolved, but as a statement that can take its place with others. He does this until all that wants to be said is spoken, until all of all of us shows up. He holds the framework for the long line, and keeps the question alive, “What’s best for US?” Many voices emerge:

“The terrorist bomber should die for his heinous crime.”

“That’s just more violence.”

“He and all of his kind must be locked out of our community.”

“How can we ever recover?”

“How do we stop this from ever happening again?”

“How do we compensate the families?”

“The anger has no end.”

“Fear is gripping our community.”

“What about the children?”

“How does this happen?”

“What do we want to have happen here?”

And the WE story, through someone or through many, begins to take hold. When the WE voice speaks it may say, “If we want to increase the community’s strength against inhuman forces, let’s include the terrorist in the discussion, along with the families and the townspeople and the security forces and the government. Let’s hear what he thinks about why this has happened and what can be done with him for the sake of the community. Because he is one of US.

SYM • PHON •′I•A

ROZ and BEN: At the generous invitation of a friend whom we met at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, we visited South Africa in the summer of 1999 with Roz’s daughter, Alexandra. Along with the stunning beauty of the landscape and the rich variety of life, we were struck by one very remarkable thing: conversations everywhere centered on South Africa. All the enormously stimulating discussions we had, with government ministers in Cape Town or with artists in Johannesburg, with business people in Pretoria or with music teachers in Soweto, all the discussions were about South Africa. Whether we talked with our driver, or the chairman of the board of the Cape Town Symphony, or the cook, or the washerwoman, we found ourselves talking about South Africa. South Africa, the embodiment of symphonia, the sounding of all the voices together. A living, breathing entity.

Returning from a visit to a medical clinic in the township of her name, Alexandra said: “What’s so amazing is that nobody is hiding anything. All the problems of society hit you in the face. You can see the terrible conditions of the squatter camps, and the total disparity among people’s lives. It’s all in the open. And it is tolerable,” she said, “because you see that it’s not how people want it to be. It seems as though everyone knows that everybody is trying to change it. They don’t identify a particular group as being a problem. It’s the whole society that has the problem, like a broken bone. I wonder how much of this has to do with the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”

TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION

Mandela’s post-apartheid, fully representational South African government confronted the dilemma that faces every nation emerging from a long period of savage violence. What attitude do you take toward the perpetrators, the people whose very existence intensifies bitterness and hatred in an already wounded society? What policies do you adopt to heal the nation?

To address this question, the South African government put into place a framework for the possibility of the integration of all aspects of society, and appointed Archbishop Desmond Tutu as its chairman. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) offered amnesty to individuals who were prepared to tell the whole truth, publicly, and could prove that their violent deeds had been politically motivated. If an individual chose not to appear before the Commission, he or she agreed to be tried in conventional ways. Written into the South African constitution was the vision of the TRC: “a need for understanding, but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu [brotherhood] but not for victimization.” 1 It might seem that Mandela’s government took a huge risk by instituting the Truth Commission. After all the atrocities, wouldn’t justice have to be served? Might not people otherwise take the law in their own hands? But the TRC appears to have been founded on another story, the story that we really are our central selves longing to connect, seeking a structure that supports us to dissolve the barriers. It seems, too, to have been predicated on the idea that when the all of all of us is out in the open, and our capacity to be with the way things are expands, communities will naturally evolve toward integration. The Truth Commission served as a framework for possibility whose results, as is always the case, were unpredictable.

More “truth” was revealed than anyone had imagined was hidden, coming to light by degrees throughout the proceedings of the TRC. As one story after another emerged, the dualistic definitions of victims and perpetrators shifted and new patterns were formed, deeper understandings, and perhaps the fundamental sense of connection that we were seeing on our visit. It was not uncommon, apparently, to see the perpetrators break down in tears as they described their actions to the very families they had violated.

As a young woman realized, having just heard a policeman tell how he had killed her mother: “The TRC was never supposed to be about justice; it’s about the truth.” 2 The all of all of us. Designed to put the impulse for revenge at one remove and to bring forward the enemy as a human being, a part of US, it was a framework for the possibility of social transformation.

And, as Mandela said, the Truth Commission “helped us to move away from the past to concentrate on the present and the future.” 3 It left the society free to take the next step.

WHILE VISIONS GO IN and out of favor, the WE remains, holding our heartbeat, moving on the impulse of the long melodic line of human possibility. Transformation from the “I” to the WE is the last practice and the long line of this book: the intentional, ongoing dissolution of the barriers that divide us, so that we may be reshaped as a unique voice in the ever-evolving chorus of the WE. Each of us can practice it from any chair, every day, anywhere. The practice of the WE draws on all the other practices. And if you attune your ear, you will hear the voice of the WE singing through each one of them in harmony.

ROSARIO

BEN: The New England Conservatory Youth Philharmonic Orchestra was on tour in Chile, and it was a day in which we had a recording session in the afternoon and a concert in the evening. I thought it was better not to have a rehearsal in the morning as well, but I was also wary of how exhausted the young players might become if they were let loose on the town. So I gathered the entire orchestra, eighty-eight strong, in a large reception room on the top floor of the Carrera Hotel in Santiago. I asked them to bring their individual parts so that we could go through the music together. Instead of assuming the role of instructor, I invited them to comment about the performances we had been giving on the tour, especially questions of interpretation. They responded to the invitation magnificently, as though they had been waiting patiently for me to ask. They did not need me to conduct the session, they took it over themselves, and about half of them spoke up during the nearly three-hour session. They didn’t confine their observations to things that related to their own parts: a trumpeter offered an insight about a viola passage, and a woodwind player discussed the tuba part as though he were about to perform it. I felt honored to be their conductor.

A couple of days later, we found ourselves on what was supposed to be a twelve-hour bus trip—but that stretched out, as a result of various mishaps, to be a seventeen-hour journey through Argentina. We had performed the night before in the world famous Teatro Communale in Santiago and were now making our way through Argentina to our engagement in the hallowed Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, stopping off to give concerts in a couple of smaller towns along the way. Although no complaint was heard from any member of the orchestra during the lengthy bus ride, I was concerned that general fatigue would cause a perfunctory performance in the less-than-prestigious hall in the small town of Rosario.

Looking for a new way of rehearsing the by-now excessively familiar New World Symphony of Dvorak, I asked the orchestra to reseat itself on the stage, so that as many players as possible were placed next to an unfamiliar instrument. A first violinist stood next to the timpani, an oboe player amongst the violas, a horn in the cello section. One of the double bass players even put himself between the concertmistress and me. The purpose was to reveal new sounds and textures that the musicians could not hear from within their own sections.

In addition, as was our custom on each day of the tour, I read aloud a quotation to serve as a point of inquiry for the rehearsal. “Never a door closes, but another one opens” was the thought for the day. I asked the players to imagine they were completely blind. They began to play the Dvorak with eyes shut tight. After a few moments, I stopped them. It was clear to all of us that the special flexibility and freedom we had worked so hard over the many months to create had been lost, leaving only a square rigid beat that they clung to in the absence of a visible leader. “When the door of eyesight closes,” I said, “what door is likely to open?” “Listening,” was the immediate response from several members of the group. We started again.

I walked to the back of the hall as they played, and was astonished to find that a new kind of music-making was emerging in that rehearsal hall like a landscape revealed at last by the dawn. Eighty-eight musicians, none of whom had intentionally memorized the score, were playing not by memory, but by heart, the entire first movement of Dvorak’s New World, with an elasticity of timing rare in an orchestra of seeing musicians, unfathomable in an orchestra of blind ones. I saw that several of the visitors in the hall, teachers and music students from Rosario, were weeping, moved as I was by the connections present on stage and in the hall, and by something like a new voice, a true one, audible for the first time.

Uplifted, I returned to the stage and asked the young players to imagine that they had miraculously recovered their eyesight and still found themselves on the shores of this New World of listening. As we performed the first movement of the Dvorak once more, all eyes fully open and ears tuned to the finest nuance, I had the experience, so often sought, of wholeness of spirit. There was no leader, and there were no ones being led. Harmony was present. It was a high point not only of the tour, but also of the year, and it took place in a small town between the major engagements, where nothing of importance was likely to happen.

I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big successes. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of human pride.

—WILLIAM JAMES

Coda

YOU MAY HAVE come to this book looking for solutions to some very real problems, or you may have opened it as an idle traveler passing through. Before long you must have realized that the book had no intention of solving your problems, or even of letting you browse. It was interested in providing you with tools for your transformation.

From what to what? From a person who meets the challenges life serves up, to one who designs the stage on which her life plays out; from a single note to a long line, from partial to full expression, from the I to the WE.

How? By the same route that musicians take to get to Carnegie Hall—through practice. Choose the practices that express yourself; they will keep you in the boat. They will shape your voice as a unique contribution to us all. You can turn your attention away from the onslaught of circumstances and listen for the music of your being; then launch yourself as a long line into the world.

Over the course of our narrative you may have redrawn, somewhat, your picture of the world. Being an “adult” may now seem like quite a different matter. Perhaps it brings to mind the artist, a person like yourself who affirms that he is living in a story and takes his hand to the creation of his life. The adult as artist, a one-buttock dancer with the cooperative universe, a willing conduit for possibility.

Remember how we used to dream as children of the delicious freedom and power of being grown-up? And somehow the dream vanished along the way, and we were energized only here and there by a job well done, a spirited gathering, or an occasional week in the sun? Now that we know it’s all invented, let’s revise this story. Let’s just say that somewhere along the journey we carried too much, or slipped too often, or heard too many voices in our head, and wandered off the track. The possibility we saw so clearly as children got lost in the downward spiral, and we forgot the promise of our birth.

How fascinating!

Look around. This day, these people in your life, a baby’s cry, an upcoming meeting—suddenly they seem neither good nor bad. They shine forth brilliantly as they are. Awake restored! … to the dream revived.