Archives For meaning

Why Broken Lampshades Are the Best Gift This Holiday Season

December 14, 2012 — 10 Comments

Lampshades can emit tremendous beauty. Even broken ones. Maybe we’re all like broken lampshades, and maybe we don’t need to wait to be fixed in order to be beautiful…

Domestic Object 005

Photo Credit: swirlingthoughts (Creative Commons)

THE WAITING GAME

Every therapy office has a waiting room. Waiting rooms are an important part of the therapeutic experience—they contain those rare moments of peace and quiet before entering the psychotherapy room. Moments of decision, when we decide what parts of our story we will share with the person we have chosen to trust.

But I wonder if sometimes the waiting doesn’t end in the waiting room.

We enter into the therapy room and immediately begin a waiting of a different kind. Waiting to be fixed. Waiting to be cured. Waiting to be repaired. Waiting as passive recipients of a remedy—a word or an experience that will leave us finally feeling whole. We have put our lives on hold until we feel, finally, perfectly put together. We wait to truly begin our lives. We are waiting until we feel properly fit for purpose and meaning.

I think this happens in psychotherapy offices all the time.

But I wonder if we also wait like this in our hearts and homes and neighborhoods and nations and in our world.

Advent—the liturgical season leading up to Christmas—is meant to be a season of waiting, but I wonder if we’re all waiting for the wrong thing. I wonder if we are all waiting until we feel like we have it all together—afraid to really put ourselves out into the world while we still feel so cracked and broken.

MY BROKEN LAMPS

I have three lamps in my office. Each of them has a lampshade the color and texture of old parchment paper. They emit a warm, even glow and people who peak into my office on a dark winter afternoon will often remark on the sense of peacefulness evoked by the lamplight.

My lamps create beauty.

And they appear to be pristine themselves—perfect, whole, untarnished, classy. But I’m going to let you in on a little secret: they’re all broken. The lampshade on my desk is marred by water stains, which are rendered invisible when the light is turned on. The lampshade on my side table has a gash across the back of it. And the shade on my newest lamp—the floor lamp—was torn in assembly before I even had a chance to turn it on.

My lampshades are stained and ripped and torn. My lamps are a mess.

And they are beautiful.

BROKEN AND BEAUTIFUL

We’re all ripped lampshades.

We’re all stained by life, ripped by experience, and torn by pain. But there is good news: we don’t need to wait to be beautiful. We don’t need to wait to be fixed or cured or somehow redeemed in order to be an inviting light in this world.

On U2’s most recent album, Bono sings: “You don’t know how beautiful you are. You don’t know, and you don’t get it, do ya? You don’t know how beautiful you are.”

Perhaps the best gift we can give ourselves this holiday season is to know that we are all broken lampshades. Broken people. Stained, ripped, torn and beautiful people. If we could cling to the grace of this, perhaps we would step out of the waiting rooms of our lives and step courageously into this world—into marriage and parenting and friendship and into quiet moments in which we keep only our own company.

Maybe we would discover that our rips and tears are like a prism, reflecting the light within us in unique and beautiful ways. Maybe in this discovery we would become a gift given to others, as well. Broken and beautiful givers of light, inviting others into the peaceful glow of the light we cast.

Let’s be ripped and torn together this season. And let’s know precisely how beautiful we are.

QUESTIONS: Is there something you’ve been waiting to begin. How could you step into that new part of your life now, before you are completely whole? Share your thoughts in the comments section.          

DEAR READER, As many of you already know, my new eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is now available free in PDF format. (It will soon be available in Kindle, Nook, and iBook formats but I wanted to honor the Season by delivering this gift to you now.) If you are not yet a subscriber, you can simply click here to subscribe. Your subscription confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook for free. If you are an existing e-mail subscriber, your e-mail of December 11 contains a link to download a free copy of The Marriage Manifesto! I have so much appreciated your outpouring of praise and support for the book in the last few days. You have given me the gift of your readership, and I’m glad to be able to give this gift back to you. Warmly, Kelly

In Purpose & Meaning , , , , , , , , ,
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Looking for Thanksgiving in All the Wrong Places

November 16, 2012 — 13 Comments

The scientists and theologians are beginning to agree: gratitude is the secret to peace and joy and meaningful living. When those two crowds can get together on something, we would all do well to listen…

giving thanks

Photo Credit: Gisela Giardino (Creative Commons)

The week of Thanksgiving is upon us, inaugurating the season of ritual and tradition—festivities that will warm us through the longest night of the year and into the beginning of another trip around the sun.

This week, schools will close. Offices will go silent and store shelves will be emptied and homes will come alive with fragrance and flavor. We will travel from near and far to gather together as family and friends and lovers and souls bound together by our common humanity. Wine will be poured and bread will be broken. Tables will be emptied and bellies will be distended.

We will pause for the briefest of moments, before we enter into the season of shopping and gift-giving and candy canes and midnight masses and festivals of lights.

We will pause to be grateful.

Yet gratitude is an elusive creature, isn’t it?

If we can capture it and enter into its fullness, we will find ourselves in the midst of peace and joy and meaning. But it is not so easily caught. Why is it so elusive?

Maybe we are tracking the wrong scent without even knowing it…

WHAT THANKSGIVING IS NOT

Gratitude is not just a feeling of thanksgiving. It’s not the warm-fuzzy that wells up when our bellies are full and the kids are behaving and the bank account has some padding. Because when the warm-fuzzy subsides, gratitude remains.

And gratitude is not a platitude. It is not, “Oh, well, I could have it worse, so I really should be grateful.” It’s not even, “Holy cow, look how good I’ve got it, I sure am thankful for my good fortune.” These platitudes are comparisons in disguise, and comparisons are fatal to gratitude. Because sooner or later, life will put us on the wrong side of that comparison, and what we thought was gratitude will be a vapor.

But most importantly, gratitude is not an experience of victory. It is not the place we arrive when we work and earn and achieve and have finally been properly recognized or given what we deserve. In fact, this subtle sense of entitlement to the good things in life is actually the antithesis of gratitude.

The truth is, gratitude can only arise within us when we feel undeserving.

BOB DYLAN AND THANKSGIVING

Last month, my wife and I celebrated our 11th anniversary with dinner and an exchange of cards. When I opened my card, my jaw dropped.

Two tickets to see Bob Dylan at the United Center with one of my best friends and fellow Dylan fanatic.

My wife can’t stand Bob Dylan. She hates it when I go to concerts without her. And because of a work event the night of the concert, she had to juggle a million logistics to make it possible. And yet she sat there with a big-beaming smile on her face as I tried to retrieve my jaw from the floor.

I felt completely undeserving.

And completely grateful.

THANKSGIVING IS A PARADOX

Gratitude is a paradox. It is a deeply felt sense that we are undeserving of what we have received—an awareness that all of life comes to us as a gift. Every sunrise, every breath, every moment of health, every bite of food, every cup of drink, every act of kindness, every moment of joy in the midst of sorrow, every moment of courage in the midst of suffering, every moment of strength and weakness and glory and mess.

And yet, to experience authentic gratitude, we must also experience the other side of the paradox—a sense of worthiness that gives us the freedom to accept the gift.

We must know that what we do can earn us nothing of real value, yet who we are makes us worthy to receive all good things. How do we know when we have captured this kind of gratitude?

I think this kind of gratitude gives.

THE SYMPTOMS OF THANKSGIVING

Gratitude doesn’t just smile and feel warm and fuzzy or express thanks with words. When authentic gratitude takes ahold of us, we experience an uncontainable desire to give. Not a compulsive desire to give back and reciprocate out of obligation. But an overwhelming desire to become a giver—someone who walks through the world handing out undeserved gifts of grace wherever they go.

A smile at the enraged driver in the lane next to you. A gentle hello to the person who cuts ahead of you in the supermarket lane. A thoughtful note to someone who never remembers you. A warm cup of coffee waiting for the spouse who was nasty last night. A good morning kiss to the kid who terrorized your household the day before.

Gratitude gives gifts that are unearned but honor the worthiness in everyone around us. Because when we experience real I-don’t-deserve-this-yet-I-feel-worthy-enough-to-receive-it gratitude, we can’t do anything less.

I’d like to think that’s why we will fill malls and stores around the nation this week: because sitting at our dinner tables on Thanksgiving day, we will feel undeserving of the riches. We will know that ultimately our own strength is responsible for none of it. And yet we are worthy to receive the gift. And knowing this, we stream into stores seeking to give the gift back.

I’d like to think that.

What do you think?

QUESTIONS: What is your experience of authentic gratitude? What do you give? How do you respond when this kind of gratitude wells up in you? Share your experience in the comments section.

DEAR READER, Last week, I shared with you an excerpt from my new eBook. And I mentioned that I will be giving the eBook away for free to email subscribers. I’m doing this because I am truly grateful. I don’t feel like these words are my own. I’m not sure where they come from. While I have them, they feel like a gift to me. And I want to give them back to you. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for details about how to get the eBook for free! And, as always, thanks for reading. It is truly a gift. Sincerely, Kelly

In Mindfulness & Gratitude , , , , , ,
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(What Your Dentist Knows) About the Secret to Life

August 3, 2012 — 24 Comments

walking through pain into a big worldWe think the secret to life is achievement and status and comfort and painlessness. But we’re wrong. The secret to life lies elsewhere. I know, because my dentist told me…

“Until you can completely feel pain again, don’t eat anything.”

I was sitting in the dental chair last week—the right side of my face numb and drooping—when he said it, when my dentist told me the secret to life.

Our pain is the secret to life.

We can’t even eat unless we’re capable of feeling it.

Yet, we are a people obsessed with avoiding our pain. The DEA reports sales of prescription painkillers increased sixteen-fold in the last ten years. Oxycodone and hydrocodone are the two most popular painkillers—in 2010, pharmacies distributed 111 tons of those pills.

In the U.S. alone.

We build our lives around comfort and safety and ease. We feel entitled to painless living. Both physically and emotionally. We will go to great lengths to avoid our interior pain—our sadness, grief, powerlessness, fear, despair, shame, and anger. As Carl Jung said, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.”

But what is the psychological equivalent of a painkilling pill?

I think we numb our psychological pain with myth.

By myth, I mean the ever-so-slightly deceptive stories we tell ourselves. About ourselves. About other people. About the world we live in. Our personal myths are the beliefs that protect us from the pain of life.*

Young men will tell themselves they love the bachelor lifestyle, so they don’t have to enter into the sweaty-browed risk of real intimacy and their own sense of inadequacy.

Young women will tell themselves they are in charge—and every weekend it’s the same bed but a different man—so they never have to acknowledge how empty it feels when they are finally alone.

We put doctors on pedestals, so we don’t have to fully feel the terror of the disease.

People who have given up on this life will survive it by adopting a set of rules that will guarantee there place in another life.

Perhaps (and this one haunts me), some of us may even write blog posts about redemption and compassion, so we can feel satisfied with our effort and avoid some of the painful work of love in our own lives.

And our myths protect us against the details of our story that feel too painful to acknowledge: the haunting vacancy in the eyes of our parents, the desperate race for worth in a family who dressed up competition as nurturance, the bitter loneliness of the schoolyard taunts, the aching regret about sleeping with that guy freshman year, the nagging emptiness of a paycheck with no meaning, or the walking-on-eggshells way of life in a household dominated by one person’s anger.

Our myths keep the pain of reality at bay, and so they sustain us with a false sense of freedom.

But what if we’re like puppies, chasing our tails inside the comfort of a grassy yard, thinking we’re free, when we’re actually imprisoned? What if our pain is like an invisible electrical fence, keeping us penned in and depriving us of a vast world and the freedom to fully live in it? What if our personal myths are just Kibbles ‘n Bits—pacifying morsels that keep us from deciding to walk through our pain into the freedom of fully living?

What would it look like to freely enter into our pain and walk through it? What might a life of freedom look like on the other side of our pain?

Earlier this summer, Chicagoland was in the throes of another heat wave. Through thick evening air, cicadas protested the end of day and crickets welcomed the night. I was with family, celebrating a birthday, and I was embroiled in an intense battle. I had the upper hand. My boys had water guns.

But I had the hose.

I smugly enjoyed the power as they approached me with their feeble weapons, and I drenched them in a cold-stinging flood from the hose. I had no intention of getting wet and spending the evening in the discomfort of wet-clinging attire. And the kids were powerless against me.

But then something happened.

My oldest son started to walk toward me with a different kind of look on his face. It was peaceful and determined and somehow knowing. I warned him to step back. But he kept walking.

So, I sprayed him.

But Aidan just kept walking forward into the jet of water, throwing his head back and letting loose a maniacal scream. And when he was within range, he raised his water gun and opened fire on me.

He was William Wallace with a super soaker.

And, this may sound a little strange, but I suddenly felt powerless. Aidan was attached to nothing. He had no interest in staying comfortable or painless. He didn’t care about the wet, the cold, or the sting. He had welcomed the discomfort and the pain—it no longer controlled him, and consequently he had become incredibly powerful.

I think the willingness to walk into our pain sets us free, and I think that kind of freedom makes us a powerful people.

In a culture that says we should be working at all costs to numb our pain, the therapeutic experience is a place of rebellion. In the paraphrased words of Peter Rollins, it is “nothing less than the taking place of the Real. It is the incoming of that which cannot be contained in our various mythologies, that which ruptures them and calls them into question.” I am always in awe of my clients, who for one hour a week choose to question their myths and walk through the pain of it.

In the therapeutic space, people are deciding the tiny-comfortable yard-of-life, in which they have been wearing a path, is no longer big enough for them. They are insisting there is more to life. They have decided there is a vast, beautiful world waiting for them—a world they are missing and that is missing them. They have decided to forsake their myths in favor of the real, and they are stepping directly into the pain of their invisible fences.

And they are learning the pain is intense. But it doesn’t last. If you keep moving into it, keep moving forward, the pain is temporary. And they are stepping onward into the vast freedom of a world completely open to them—a world in which pain is an acceptable consequence of fully living.

They are learning that people are waiting on the other side of the fence, to embrace them, and to walk hand-in-hand with them into the open expanse filled with possibility and wonder.

They are discovering the power of a people who are not absolved of pain, but who are set free from the fear of feeling it.

In the end, the secret to life is this:

The whole wide world is a banquet table, and there is a feast waiting for you. But you don’t get a seat at the table—you can’t eat—until you can feel your pain completely.

That’s what my dentist told me.

Your thoughts? Have you embraced pain in a way that you were able to let it go and move on into fuller living? Please feel free to share your story with us in the comments below.

About the Blog: The next Tuesday Tip will focus on a method for staying present with our pain, rather than running from it. Subscribe in the sidebar and receive the tip, as well as future posts, in your email inbox!

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And always, thank you for reading. It’s a gift.

*For the term “myth,” I owe a debt of gratitude to the recent writing of Peter Rollins.

In Purpose & Meaning, Therapy & Personal Growth , , , , , , ,
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Passive, Boring Hope (Part 2 of 3)

April 20, 2012 — 7 Comments

Once we have awakened to the possibility of hope, we immediately encounter the first hurdle of the hopeful life—a hurdle over which we can stumble back into despair and hopelessness…and the hurdle is the nature of hope itself. Because hope has at least two expressions, and in one form it is passive and dull and it doesn’t change anything…

Hope is just wishful thinking, isn’t it?

We hope for a lot of things around my house. My oldest son hopes he can save enough money to buy a Nintendo DS before he’s too old to care. Meanwhile, he consistently succumbs to impulse in the checkout lane, and his piggy bank remains hungry for funds. My younger son hopes (inexplicably) that we will have “buttered pasta” for dinner. Every night. He’s disappointed at least six nights a week. My youngest one, the one with the bright eyes and soft curls and the color pink she calls “mine,” hopes her brothers will see her as an equal. Sometimes they almost do. And my wife hopes I will eventually be a little less introverted. Hope is just wishful thinking, right?

Ironically, when hope is a verb, it’s pretty impotent—it doesn’t change anything. The dictionary defines (verb)hope in this way: “To look forward to with reasonable desire or confidence.” (Verb)hope is all about waiting, anticipating, and being “reasonably confident” we will attain the object of our desire. As it turns out, (verb)hope is a pretty passive phenomenon. We hope the next chapter will bring something new and different, but the next chapter is not going to write itself. Portable video games don’t get purchased until we first master our desire for trinkets. Or we insist on hoping for things that simply aren’t going to be a part of our story—we can tantrum for nightly pasta until we are breathless, but it’s not going to happen. Yet, we write our stories with this kind of  hope, and before long the hope we have so recently discovered becomes a huge disappointment.

But hope is not only a verb.

Hope is also a noun. And (noun)hope can transform everything. When hope is a noun, when it is an experience that possesses us and defines us, it is devastatingly powerful. The dictionary defines (noun)hope as “the feeling that what is wanted can be had and that events will turn out for the best.” [Italics not mine—when the dictionary starts emphasizing words, you know they’re important.] Whereas (verb)hope focuses us on the future, waiting for a desired outcome, (noun)hope becomes transformational right here and now—it’s as if hope reaches backward from the future and begins to transform the present.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Somehow, (noun)hope reaches even further, into our past, assuring us the events that happened there don’t have to remain meaningless, showing us how those broken chapters will become an integral part of the beautiful, redemptive story we are telling with our lives. When it becomes more than just a way of anticipating the future, when it becomes something we possess and it begins to define us as people, hope becomes unhinged from time and starts to change everything: our expectations for the future, the way we relate to the present, and the way we understand the past. It changes all things, because it changes the only thing present in every scene of our story—(noun)hope changes us.

We have a seventy-year-old maple tree in our front yard. It towers over our house, hugging the front of the house and wrapping itself around the side, as well. In the spring, I sit in my reading chair in the upstairs dormer, which is engulfed by the tree, and I feel like I’m in a treehouse with green-life erupting all around me. In the summer, it shades our house from the scalding Midwest sun during the sultriest hours of the day. In the fall, it explodes into oranges and reds, and people stop and stare, and when my kids tell me to hug it and kiss it I’m glad for the excuse. In the winter, it stands sentinel, its dancing shadow making the rare winter sun shimmer on our living room floor, reminding us of life just beneath the surface of winter. I LOVE that tree.

But last spring it bloomed with a bare canopy and holes in the leaves and sickly-looking seedlings. I panicked. (Welcome to my neurosis.) I pounded fertilizer stakes around the drip line, I watered it with Miracle-Gro, and I called in the tree guys. I wanted to scream as the professional looked at it and nonchalantly described the four different bacteria it picked up in the cold-wet spring. And then he told me I would just have to hope it would come back healthy next year. Just hope. Passive, tedious, anxiety-provoking hope.

As the fall approached, and the tree’s pathetic, shriveled leaves began falling to the ground while the school supplies were still smelling fresh and all the other trees were still green, something hit me hard. I realized how much I live my life with (verb)hope. I realized how much energy I invest in hoping life’s myriad outcomes will break my way, while I fret and worry. And of course, this was bigger than the tree. I felt sick about the way I was living my entire story, and I ached to make my hope a noun, something I could embody and be filled by, making me hope-full.

I ached to rewrite the character I was playing in my own story. I wanted that character to change. To trust that he would be okay, regardless of which trees fell, or which basements flooded, or how much the healthcare company slashed his psychotherapy fees, or which child got sick, or who was misunderstanding his heart. I wanted to be the author of a character who didn’t spend his time hoping the future would deliver him from pain and trial and conflict, but a character who could drink down the cup of life to the dregs, entering into all the mess with hopefulness and peace. A character whose hope gave him the strength to enter into the confusion of life and the perseverance to stay there, rather than sitting idly in the waiting room of (verb)hope and yearning for an escape from life’s trials.

I wanted to have the courage I was witnessing every day on the other side of the therapy office. Because my clients teach me about hope, as well. They have taught me that, as hope becomes the pen of our character arc, we discover the earliest chapters of our stories are not something to be disowned, or edited to the cutting room floor. Instead, we begin to recall the hard, early chapters as the setting of a story that is about healing and change, the setting for a really good character arc. The events of the past are no longer a random, cruel chapter of life—they become the backdrop for a life-story that can inspire the uninspirable. (Noun)hope is not a future that we wait for, it is the energy of transformation, right here and now, and it is a lens of grace, through which we can look at the chapters of brokenness we have lived and find meaning there.

In the end, the sickness of my beloved tree was a blessing, because it revealed a sickness in me—the dis-ease of (verb)hope. By the way, the tree bloomed full and green in this warm, early spring. It’s beautiful again. But not as beautiful as this: by the time the leaves popped, it didn’t matter what they looked like. (Noun)hope had bloomed, and the limitations of life and the finitude of all things material had been stripped of some of their power to disappoint and terrorize and defeat.

(Noun)hope changes everything, because it changes us. I wonder if you’re as thirsty as I was for the kind of hope that transforms us into people who not only survive, but thrive, in the midst of life’s pain and suffering. Are you bored by a hope that keeps you stuck and waiting? Are there chapters of your life that need to be redeemed by writing a purpose for them into your story? Do you want to genuinely enjoy the character you are living out in your life-story, a character that is engaging life and hungry for transformation? If so, begin the hunt for (noun)hope today, track it down ruthlessly, and don’t stop until you have captured a hope that transforms, and heals, and redeems. You were made for nothing less.

 

What’s Your Story: Perhaps you’d like to share about a time when waiting with passive hope left you disappointed, but deciding to change yourself became a hope-full and life-giving endeavor? Please feel free to share your story, or any other thoughts, in the comments. If you are reading this by e-mail or RSS feed, click here to comment.

Note: Next week I will post the final part of this reflection on hope, and I think it will be entitled, “Dangerous Hope.” If you would like to be notified of that post, and future posts, you can subscribe by e-mail in the sidebar. You can also receive notification by joining me on Twitter or Facebook. And, as always, thanks for reading. It’s a gift. 

Note: When I began writing this post, it was a lot less about me and a lot more about the psychotherapeutic endeavor. In the end, I could only ask so much of your attention, so I cut most of the psychotherapy reflection, which was the original inspiration for the post. If you are interested in reading about it, feel free to visit my Facebook page, where I elaborate on how this relates to what happens in the first seven sessions of psychotherapy.

Photo Credit: Taken from the following website: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/tracking-offline-conversions-hope-seven-best-practices-bonus-tips/

Check It Out: For a brilliant depiction of (noun)hope in song, check out Alabama Shakes, performing “Hold On,” on Conan O’Brien.

In Therapy & Personal Growth , , , , ,
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Live Passionately, Not Mindlessly (Part 3 of 3)

March 31, 2012 — 1 Comment

Our passions usher us into a saturated life. Extravagant fondness is the doorway into Oz, propelling us out of a gray-tone existence and into a Technicolor world. And once we have overcome our fear of the witches that await us, we are free to step into the realm of wonder.

According to the philosopher, Jean-Luc Marion, we may encounter any phenomenon—an element of nature, a creation of man, another human being, an idea, an event or experience, even God—as either a saturated or poor phenomenon.* A saturated phenomenon is iconic—it opens us up to complexity and meaning, vastness and beauty, and a kind of energy that transports us into a place of awe. Or we may encounter the very same experience with no awareness, intention, or interest, and in doing so it remains (to us) a poor phenomenon. Poor phenomena are like idols, they strip the infinitely complex of its beauty and its power to inspire. They cage wonder.

At any given moment, we stand at this fork in the road.

The bad news is we tend to be a pretty mindless, inattentive people. Of course, the truth of this is hidden from us: we feel like our attention is constantly multiplying, because our attention is pulled in so-many-directions. As it turns out, though, America doesn’t run on Dunkin’—it runs on the ability keep you distracted from any one thing, convincing you that you need to buy that item or do that activity or go to that place. Multi-tasking has become an antiquated idea. We’ve become omni-taskers, trying to do it all at once. A thirty-minute business meeting gets interrupted by a dozen emails while the market plunges five percent. Or a therapy session plays out to the ping of an endless stream of text messages. Or the kids are demanding Netflix, Wii, and a Blu-ray all at the same time while the lunch burns on the stove and you’re trying to reply to six Facebook messages.  But as our attention “expands,” it is only getting stretched wide and thin, and we lose the ability to attend deeply to any one moment, or person, or movement. The world seems to thrive on our mindlessness, and as a result, everything in it is stripped of its capacity to inspire awe and wonder.

The good news is we don’t have to remain a mindless people.

We can become mindful of the awesome complexity in even the simplest things. Take a moment to watch a spider weave its web, and you will know what I mean. Did you know spiders use at least two kinds of silk? The sticky snare-silk is used to catch prey, while the spider walks around on the non-adhesive anchor-silk. And that’s just a spider web! Imagine the awe-inspiring, infinite complexity and depth of your child’s tears, or your lover’s heart, or your spouse’s wounds, or trade winds that carry radiation from a tsunami-shaken Japan to your front door, or tonight’s starry sky that delivers a light that departed those stars before there were humans on the Earth. Everything we encounter in the world can be a saturated phenomenon. And we have a choice. We can walk mindlessly through a world of idols, or we can mindfully encounter the awesome, expansive complexity of even the simplest things, and we can live the saturated life.

But how do we begin? How do we turn away from the distractions of a fractured world, and begin to develop a deep attentiveness to one phenomenon? I think the answer is embedded in our passions. You see, when the inattentive muscles of our minds are weak, we need serious help to focus, and when we find the thing we are passionate about, help has arrived. Because we adore the vocation or the work or the relationship, we come to it with an intense focus and a deep desire to become intimately familiar with its nuance and complexity. Distractions recede as our extravagant fondness takes hold. I know someone who is passionate about the interior lives of her children. She doesn’t write off her kids’ tears, or even their anger, to fatigue or hunger or adolescent hormones. Instead, she approaches the distress as an invitation to learn about the child, and to become extravagantly fond of who they are and what they are becoming. I know someone else who is passionate about how to use technology in the education of children. When the topic arises, so does he: he sits up straight, he moves to the edge of his seat, he starts to use his hands when talking. He attends the best conferences, regardless of distance. There is no book he won’t read. He grows increasingly attentive to the ways in which each of his students is responding to the smart-board. I know someone who loves to write. When he is hunting for the right word, the rest of the world fades. When he is on the scent of an idea that has infinite value to him, his attention to the craft is singular. And he revels when his words leave the world a better place. Our passions saturate the object of our desire.

And the expansive saturation we experience in our passions is contagious. Because once we have touched and tasted this kind of deep knowing, this thrill of discovery, this awe of the bottomless complexity, and the peacefulness that can come from a harnessed attentiveness, we will want more of it. We will want all of life to be soaked in the glory. The dance of light on the ceiling as our eyes open in the morning, the banter of the kids as they brush teeth in the bathroom, the fragrant bloom of an April morning, the vivid colors of a world emerging from a long winter, the story of a close friend, the quiet smile of a stranger on the train, or the unknown sorrow in the eyes of the girl brewing your coffee. When all of life becomes saturated like this, our hearts explode with passion.

But I should probably warn you—a saturated life is also a life in which our hearts break with compassion. The things we love become saturated with meaning and purpose, but so do the things that have been gnawing at our conscience, the things that make our hearts ache and our eyes blur. We may no longer be able to pick up a t-shirt off the rack and experience it as a poor phenomenon.** In a saturated world, it’s a shirt with a story. The cotton was picked and separated by impoverished hands in the South, and then it was shipped half-a-world-away on boats sailed by men and women who don’t see their families for weeks at a time so the little stomachs at home can be full. It’s assembled in Thailand, or Vietnam, or China, by people earning a wage that barely keeps them alive and in conditions that will ultimately jeopardize the life for which they are so steadfastly fighting. A saturated life is a glorious one, but it may also become a life lived in the full awareness of a broken world. This is the mystery of our passions: they may usher us into life and death, joy and sorrow, glory and gore, all at the same time.

Yet there is good news, even in this. Especially in this.

Because, when you can enter into the death of things and bring life there, when you can enter into the sorrow of life and experience joy there, when you can enter into the violence of the world and find communion there, you discover that you are truly free. Death cannot terrorize you, sorrow cannot disable you, and violence cannot isolate you. Our passions are the doorway into the saturated life, and the saturated life is complex—glorious and painful—but it is a life saturated with freedom.

Are you ready to open the door into Oz?

* I actually know very little about the philosophy of Marion. What I know was relayed to me like a game of telephone. For more about how that happened, you can go to my Facebook page, where I share an anecdote about the origination of each post. You can also click here to learn more about Marion.

** I first experienced the “saturation” of retail clothing when I read, The Divine Commodity, by Skye Jethani.

What’s Your Story: Do you find wonder in anything that the rest of us may experience as mundane? Do you want to share it in the comments below?  Or, if you are reading this by e-mail or RSS feed, click here to comment.

 Note: If you would like to be notified of future posts, you can subscribe by e-mail in the sidebar. You can also receive notification by joining me on Twitter or Facebook. And, as always, thanks for reading. It’s a gift.

In Mindfulness & Gratitude, Purpose & Meaning , , , , ,
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Live Passionately, Not Fearlessly (Part 2 of 3)

March 23, 2012 — 18 Comments

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” –Ambrose Redmoon

Living stories defined by our passions, with a sense of purpose and vocation, instead of being seduced by our skills alone, can be absolutely terrifying. Take it from me. I grew up a timid kid, and not much has changed. That’s why I married my wife. She had a tattoo and studied in Spain and jumped out of airplanes and seemed to dare the world to keep her from doing what she believed in. I was in awe of her determination.

But for many of us, maybe even most of us, stepping out of the safe harbor of our skills, and into the vast openness of our passions, can feel dangerous. Like stepping out of a plane at ten-thousand feet with only a bag of nylon strapped to your back and some stranger’s assurance that it will be good. Like free-falling. And while plummeting can be exhilarating, it will be scary. In my psychotherapy practice, I’m a witness to trembling souls who ache to step into the free-fall of their passions.  At times, I see my reflection in them.  And I think we fear making the leap for at least four reasons.

People will think you are crazy. When you forsake the seductions of skill—achievement, accolades, wealth, security—most of the world will see a fool. And that kind of judgment may cut you deep, because at your quivering core, it will probably feel foolish to you, too. In the film Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella is living the American Dream. He has a big house, a bountiful farm, and a beautiful family. Outwardly, he is a picture of success and well-being. His skills have served him well.

But he is dying inside.

So, when a supernatural voice in his cornfield exhorts him to pursue his passion for baseball and the redemption of his father’s baseball hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, by replacing his crops with a baseball field, it awakens a passion he is helpless to resist. As Ray levels his cornfield, we witness a jarring juxtaposition: while Ray is coming to life and talking to his daughter about Shoeless Joe with a contagious energy, the townspeople look on with a biting skepticism. We overhear them ask the question, “What the hell is he doing?” And then we hear the response, “He’s going to lose his farm…damn fool. “ You may not be plowing under a cornfield with your passion, but you might end up leveling a career, digging up a way of life, or turning your back on a harvest of some kind, and the on-lookers are going to scoff.

You are going to mess up. A lot. Even if people don’t question your sanity, they will be quick to point out your mistakes. But I can’t think of a better way to kill your passion than by trying to do it perfectly. You’re walking a new path, and it’s probably an unfamiliar one, so you are going to stumble. When you do, people are going to be there to point it out. And even if you could hide from the criticism of others, you won’t be able to hide from yourself—the worst critic is probably going to be inside of you. That critic got there the hard way: it was carved into you with words, both intentional and unintentional. As it turns out, sticks and stones aren’t the only things that break us.

People may not pay any attention at all. I’m not sure which is worse, for people to call us fools and tear us down with criticism, or for us to do the thing that is closest to our secret heart and have no one take notice at all. We spend our lives trying to earn the benevolent attention of parents, teachers, peers, and the barista at Starbucks. Our skills give us the best guarantee of an audience. But following your passions may take you out of the limelight and into lonely territory. It might feel like you’re free-falling all by yourself. And if there’s anything worse than taking a risk, it’s taking a risk alone.

And, finally, I think we are afraid to leap because there are no guarantees. We live our lives seeking stability, assurance, and security. We pretend that we can guarantee a particular conclusion. So, when we forsake the safety of skill and seek the danger of our passions, we unmask the illusion of certainty and leap into the terror of who-knows-what-comes-next. The landing may not be soft, it may not work out, some stories don’t end the way we want them to. It may cost you a paycheck, or a reputation, or a relationship. I suppose, depending on the passion, it could end up costing your life. And that kind of fear paralyzes.

So, our fears stand between us and our passions like an ancient wall, impervious to the erosion of time and the elements. We wait for the wall to crumble, but while we do so, precious time and life is ebbing away. I think we get confused and assume that we must first resolve our fears and the dangers of living passionately before moving forward with extravagant fondness. But that will never happen. Because living passionately is by definition to live on the edge of fear, venturing into the new and unknown with trepidation. If we want to get started with our passions, we are going to have to climb directly over that wall of fear.

In the field of psychology, a new approach to treating anxiety and fear has emerged in the last decade. It’s called acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and it’s a paradigm shift. For decades, the goal of therapy was to eliminate anxiety by changing thoughts and behaviors. It didn’t work. As it turns out, if you plan to live, you’d better plan on fear as well. The growing wisdom is that we do not eliminate our fear; rather, we learn to accept it, decide that we value something in our lives more than we value the absence of fear, and then we courageously go after it. In other words, when your path is riddled with fear and uncertainty, you had better be extravagantly fond of where that path is taking you.

And so, we discover that the passionate life is also the courageous life, because we begin to walk directly into fear, with an extravagant fondness for the stories we are telling with our lives.

After completing his baseball field, Ray Kinsella looks upon it, and we learn that the sentiments of the townspeople echo Ray’s own thoughts, when he whispers, “I have just created something totally illogical…am I completely nuts?”

But Ray says it with a smile.

That’s what living passionately does to us—everything gets turned on its head and it may be scary, but the fear gives birth to life and purpose and meaning. The frightening becomes thrilling. Foolishness is transformed into pleasure. And we mess up along the way, but we discover that we wouldn’t have it any other way, because when we start to follow our passions, they become like oxygen, and living them becomes like breathing. We don’t wait for someone to applaud the perfect breath; we breathe because there is no life without it. And even when no one is noticing, living in the middle of our passion teaches us we can tolerate loneliness and the loss of attention. We discover the attention was cheap and living with purpose has a value we couldn’t have fathomed, and we wouldn’t trade it for a crowd of any size. And we come to experience the truth of the really good stories: they don’t necessarily end safely. Some of them end with the beloved character dying with purpose in the middle of their passion: loving a wife and kids through a terminal cancer, giving the last hiding place to their child with the soldiers at the door, or jumping in front of a bullet or a bus or a train to save another life.

So, maybe there is a guarantee: that regardless of how we go out of this life, we will go out on our own terms, living passionately. We jump out of the plane. We step out of our skills and into the vast uncertainty of our passions. It feels crazy, we make mistakes on the lonely way down, and the landing isn’t guaranteed until it has arrived. We fall with fear and trembling, but our heart also hammers with the extravagant fondness for what we are doing in the world. And if we’re going to land hard—and we all do eventually, don’t we?—we may as well land in the midst of the things we love, the things that bring us life and joy, not nursing a 401k, but instead nursing a world back to life and creativity and what is good.

What’s Your Story: I suspect I was just scratching the surface with my list of the reasons for not following our passions. Have you encountered other fears that held you back? Did you overcome them to pursue your passions and, if so, what did you value more than your fear? Please feel free to share your story in the comments below, or if you are reading this by e-mail or RSS feed, click here to comment.

Note: Next week, I will post Part 3 of this reflection on living according to our passions. I think it will be entitled, “Live Passionately, Not Mindlessly,” and it will unpack the ways in which our life is expanded when we follow our passion. If you would like to be notified of that post and future posts, you can subscribe by e-mail in the sidebar. You can also receive notification by joining me on Twitter. And, again, thanks for reading. It’s a gift.

 

In Psychology, Purpose & Meaning , , , ,
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