The Broken Places

When a bone breaks and heals, the newly grown bone material at the fracture is stronger than the intact bone around the break. If the bone breaks again, it won’t be there.

So too our character is strengthened by the painful stresses and fractures life so readily affords. The healed places become our strong points.

Seen in this light, the disappointments, failures and miseries of our lives become irreplaceable, essential experiences. Without them we would be incapable of rising to our magnificent potential, fulfilling our larger purpose and realizing our deepest happiness. Nothing strengthens our core as much as heartbreak.

Armed with this information, a reassessment is in order. It’s time to look at our lives differently. Fear, it turns out, is not our friend.

Avoiding risk, playing it safe, carefully hiding from challenges and seeking comfort are the worst things you can do. Instead, identify the things you are afraid of and run toward them.

This is why growing older is so often associated with growing wiser. As you grow older life’s miseries inevitably visit you with increasing frequency. Loved ones die. Goals go unrealized. Things fall apart. And as these trials are endured, a dawning realization arises. Despite all of the tears, you’re going to be O.K. Beneath the suffering of the surface lays a deep and abiding harmony. Every spring in the forest, without fail, the flowers bloom and deer give birth to fawns. As Woody Allen said, “Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.”

As our hair falls out, our skin begins to sag, our hearing fades and stairs get inexplicably steeper, there is a simultaneous expansion of our generosity of spirit – we no longer insist on seeing everything through the lens of “what’s in it for me.” We come to learn that none of us owns any of this, it’s all borrowed, and we grow defter at releasing our grasp and graciously accepting the transitory nature of all things. In this renunciation there is a deep and abiding joy – a joy reached no other way but through the acceptance of loss and the catharsis of tears.

As I write, my old dog Boone sleeps at my feet beneath the desk. He’s a handsome fourteen year old Brittany spaniel. Most of his hearing is gone, he falls down all the time, and the light is slowly fading from his eyes. I know that day is coming soon when I’ll lift him into the back seat of the car for one last, slow ride to the veterinarian’s office.  I’ll sit with Boone on the floor of the examination room and the vet and her assistant will come in and sit on the floor with us. We’ll look at each other without a word, and then I’ll nod yes as the veterinarian administers the lethal dose of anesthesia. I’ll hold him in my arms as he takes his last breath and his body goes limp. I owe that to him, to be there, to let him die in his favorite place – my arms. Sure, I’ll be bawling my eyes out. And I won’t enjoy it. But I’ll accept it. I already do. I have to. I knew this day was coming twelve years ago when we drove him home from the rescue kennel, a spry two year old, full of vim and vigor.

We know nothing lasts, but we fall in love anyway. It won’t be the first time I’ve put a dog down, and it won’t be the last. But saying yes to love means saying yes to everything else, and it’s childish to pick and choose experiences as if life were a simple consumer experience, a shopping trip where you only get what you want.

If you want any of it, you must say yes to all of it.

Our tears, our disappointments, and our failures are the engines of our emergence. In the end, we must have gratitude even for our suffering. Protecting ourselves from life’s vicissitudes stifles and ultimately extinguishes our spirit the way a shovel of dirt extinguishes a campfire. Besides, it isn’t possible anyway. No one escapes unscathed. Security is an illusion. The only choice left to us is moving forward with a yes on our lips instead of a no.

And suffering is not yet done giving gifts.

When we live consciously awake to our suffering, fully acknowledging the way our wounds construct the frame upon which our magnificence is built, we gain an unprecedented capacity for compassion. We empathize with a boldness the timid egotist dare not gamble. With new eyes we see the imperfections of others not as problems, but as opportunities. We still hold high standards and even higher aspirations for ourselves and others, but we accept ourselves and others as is. As the Zen saying goes, “You’re perfect just the way you are, but you could use a little improvement.”

We are now more readily able to forgive. We know that people are only as good as they know how to be. It isn’t moral weakness as much as cognitive error that drives the evil of the world – even the criminal believes they are actualizing their highest good as best they understand it. All of us are limited and bound by our current mode of thinking, our current concept of ourselves and the world. As we interact with others in the workplace, in our families, and in our communities, we soften our glance, stand firm, and sway to and fro like tall trees in high wind. Our flexibility is our strength. Our own woundedness and our own imperfection are the talismans that unlock our vision into the woundedness of others. We get better at hearing what isn’t said, seeing what isn’t shown and knowing what can’t be known. Yes it’s a paradox. But such is the mystery at the center of all things.

The last gift of our broken places is a deep and vibrant humility. Because we have been laid low by the body blows of grief and sorrow, we know full well that we are not in charge of any of this. We are merely witnesses.  We engage as effectively and powerfully as we can, intending to do good, aspiring to build great things and practicing our craft as consciously as possible.  And yet, no matter how flexible you are, a sudden gust can knock it all down. The ephemeral, transitory nature of reality humbles all but the most stubbornly ignorant among us. Wisdom understands its weakness in the face of larger forces.

The broken places, in us and in others, fortify us, teach us, and in the final analysis hold us all together. We are supported in all we do by the strength of our broken places. And there is still one final revelation. Not only is our strength, our empathy, our forgiveness, and our humility rooted in our wounds, but so is our love. Love is the flowering and the fruition of our strength, our empathy, our forgiveness and our humility – each of these experiences, each of these modes of consciousness leads us into the heart of the sacred fire, a fire that at once burns away everything about us that is inauthentic, while forging an unbreakable bond between all of the things that matter. From now on, every chasm bridged, every wound healed, and every longing fulfilled. This is how we grow whole from the broken places.

Afterword
Boone died on Wednesday, October 23, 2013 at 4:25 p.m., two days after I submitted this column to my editor for publication in the San Diego Troubadour. He faded suddenly, and as he struggled to breathe on that long last afternoon, we eased his passing with an overdose of anesthesia. Just like I promised him we would.

Making Gratitude Real

[This article originally appeared in the November/December 2013 issue of Unity Magazine and is reprinted here with permission.]

How a number two pencil became a magic wand that broke one spell and cast another

 I had to do something. I had to change my mind. I couldn’t keep trudging down the same tired road, stuck like water in a channel it did not choose. I needed to dig a new channel. But I couldn’t find the shovel.

Simply scolding myself to think new thoughts didn’t help. Habitual conditioning doesn’t break that easily.

I needed to take action.

I began to keep a gratitude journal.

Every morning for a year I got up and sat with my blank book and a pencil. I’d write, “I’m grateful for…” and wait. Sometimes it took a while. But I always came up with something. Even if I didn’t really feel it, I wrote it anyway. Action precedes internal transformation.

I often wrote about the same things – my wife, my work, my home. And sometimes fleeting moments crept in – the color of the sky, a hovering hummingbird, the smell of French onion soup.

Some days it was easy. Some days it was hard. But a certain tenacity, a stubborn doggedness took hold. I was not going to screw this up. My ego was on the line. Hey, whatever it takes.

After a few weeks something began to shift. I began to look forward to my morning writing. It was a chance to testify, to tell the simple truth about the life I live, to proclaim and record the evidence that life has infinite value and is fleshed out with a beauty that takes your breath away. It is surprisingly not often that one gets to say true things. It’s generally frowned upon in polite conversation. People look at you like you’re drunk.

Then a few months later I began to notice a subtler, deeper shift. The daily practice of writing concrete examples of gratitude made me look at my experiences through different eyes. As I went through my day I scanned the periphery like a predator for beauty, grace, and the generosity of the world, you know, things to be grateful for. Knowing that I had a writing assignment due in a few hours, I stayed vigilant, eyes wide for bounty. And do you know what happens when you look for something? You find it.

This is the secret power of the gratitude journal. In the end, the journal doesn’t matter. It’s just the leavings after the feast. It’s not the product, it’s the process that changes you. The gratitude journal is simply a device, a shovel for digging a new channel through which the restless mind can flow.

Before I began keeping a gratitude journal I passed the hours in worry and fear, convinced that I had to guard against the inevitable onslaughts of an uncaring world and navigate a sea of vaguely dangerous human beings all working at cross purposes. It was stressful. After keeping a gratitude journal for a year these old habits of thought were reprogrammed. The scales fell from my eyes and I began to see the world as a field of infinite possibility, a beneficent, nourishing, beautiful home filled with creative people all working toward the good as best they understood it.

I didn’t change the world. I changed the way I saw the world.

And then the final, subtlest and most important shift occurred. An insight arose from the marrow of my bones. In the authority of my own experience I came to know something I had previously only suspected, or read about second-hand in the world’s great spiritual classics, like Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” I came to know that I was one with the sacred source of all things, an integral member of an interconnected web of being. I made peace with paradox and declared an everlasting armistice with myself. My conflicted confusion gave way to confident serenity. My grimace of anxiety gave way to a smile. I began to laugh more easily and cry more deeply. The light returned to my eyes. I let go of the need to control, a need born of the fear that there is never enough. I came home to myself, and found that it was a pretty good place to live.

Who knew that a pencil and a piece of paper could do all of that?

Yelp Yourself

My BFF Steve Morton and I used to play a lot of music together. After one sparsely attended coffee house gig many years ago a guy in the audience came up to us and said, “Man, you guys got balls.” To this day I still don’t know if he meant it favorably, as in, Wow, it takes courage to get on stage and I admire you for that, or, if he meant God that was awful and how dare you. Learning how to be a performer is hard. But the hardest thing by far is learning how to navigate audience feedback.

Every performer knows that the only people who come up and talk to you after a show are people who really liked what you did. Therefore, their opinions give you a false sense of awesomeness. None of the people who were bored or underwhelmed bothered to bring that to your attention.

The same dynamic holds true for writers, teachers, and artists of all stripes. Compliments come your way far more readily than rebukes. People who don’t like your stuff just ignore you. If you want to improve, you have to be your own harshest critic. You can’t really trust what people say, especially in the early years. Your friends and family just want to encourage you. “Great set,” they say. “Good job.” Thank them for their support, but don’t believe a word of it.

And then along came social media.

Everything changed.

Now everybody really is a critic.

In the digital anonymity of the Age of Yelp every tiny flaw is photographed, videotaped, and posted for all to see alongside scathing essays articulating the myriad ways you suck.

But Yelp isn’t all bad. It’s been a great help to me, especially when I travel. It quickly lets you sort through a long list of local restaurants and hone in on the best. You can’t trust those guidebooks in the hotel room – they’re just paid ads. Yelp, on the other hand, is beyond the reach of the chamber of commerce, much to their horror. Businesses live in fear of Yelp, and rightly so. Yelp is nothing more than the hive-mind reacting immediately and without filter.

It’s funny to watch some restaurant owners log on and try to respond to critics. Some take a conciliatory tone and apologize for the negative experience, vowing to improve. To me, that’s a good sign. Others launch into open combat, attacking their critics. I tend to stay away from those places.

Maybe it isn’t so complicated. If you’re a restaurant and you serve thoughtful, well-prepared, flavorful, creative, wholesome food of any genre in a clean, beautiful, fun environment staffed by decent, kind, attentive employees your Yelp reviews will be golden. If your restaurant smells like wet gym socks, you serve (gasp) canned refried beans and you haven’t changed the oil in your deep fryer since the Bush administration, people are going to talk.

It’s the same with songwriting, painting, poetry or any creative endeavor – bring together the right elements, put in the years of disciplined training, work hard every day and learn to trust yourself. No song, or plate of food, is going to please everyone. But if it’s good, it will find an appreciative palate.

And what about the naysayers? What about those bold, opinionated folks who feel the need to point out all of the ways your work falls short?

Give them a moment of your attention. Take in their criticism. They may be pointing out a weakness to which you were blind – a weakness that needs correcting. But bear in mind that no opinion, no matter how well articulated, is a fact. Sometimes critics know more than you and their observations help steer you toward higher quality output. Other times they are simply using your work as a sounding board, an opportunity to demonstrate their cleverness and alleged superiority. It takes great skill to navigate the hurtful assessments levied against us by our most vocal critics. Have the courage to listen. But don’t linger. Let it roll off your back like water off a duck.

In the end, it is we who must decide what good means. And we have to take full responsibility for working diligently to achieve it. Creating anything means you will be misunderstood. The only way to avoid being misconstrued or criticized is to produce nothing. Sit on your bed, don’t move, don’t say a word and don’t create anything. Oh wait. Somebody will probably criticize you for that too. Damn. Turns out there is no way to avoid negative criticism. So what the hell – might as well create something.

The process of giving birth is always painful. It’s bloody and it’s messy. The newborn thing is unformed, indeterminate, and waiting to be molded by a thousand different internal and external factors. Yet we can’t stop making things. It’s what we do. It’s who we are. We use these hands with these opposable thumbs and these minds and these hearts to fashion new works from the raw materials around us, wrought with the hammer, anvil and fire of our own experience. How can you not be hurt a little when someone thinks your baby is ugly? And yet you’re head over heels in love with it anyway. You nurture it, and draw sustenance from the conviction that somehow, someway, the world will be just a tiny bit better off because this thing was born. This faith, this naïve confidence, is easily misconstrued as arrogance or Narcissism. But don’t let that stop you. If you have something to say, say it. Don’t let the naysayers in the peanut gallery shush you. If someone unfairly criticizes your album, your restaurant, your book or your painting, just say, “Thank you. Can’t wait to hear your album, taste your food, read your book or see your painting.” Creativity is courageous, criticism is cowardly. It’s easy to sit on the bench, not play and criticize the players.

So all this new social media isn’t really new after all. Open forums like Yelp and Facebook simply give voice to what were formally private thoughts and impressions. As creators, as artists, as restaurateurs, we have to turn this new reality to our advantage. In this strange new age of universal journalism – every phone a television camera, every schmuck a media mogul – we have to learn to thrive.

Instead of being defined by the new reality, you have to define it.

You have to learn how to Yelp yourself.

What do I mean by Yelp yourself? You have to carefully assess your work from every conceivable angle and ask yourself all of the hard questions. You have to learn to see your work through every eye, hear it through every ear – you must, in effect, become the hive-mind, the crowd source, the omniscient Zeitgeist. An entrepreneur who fears feedback is an entrepreneur doomed to fail. Learn how to put up with a couple of grouches. But also learn to read feedback as invaluable data that helps you hone your gift into its sharpest focus and deepest impact.   

The Nature of Fear

Fear is good. It keeps us alive. It keeps us from falling off cliffs, touching fire and kissing rattlesnakes. But fear is also our greatest liability. It keeps us from taking the risks necessary to develop our unrealized potential. If we let it, fear has the power to keep us from becoming who we really are. Fear is a thief that steals our joy.

The daily work of every thinking man and woman is to practice careful discernment in the assessment of their fear. A life of pointless risk-taking is dangerous and foolish while a life devoted to the avoidance of all risk is doomed to frustration, stagnation and incompletion.  Fear is neither good nor evil; it is a message from our psyche that must be read with great care. Cultivating the skill to interpret fear accurately is an essential task in the creation of the well-lived and fully-realized life. When fear arises, ask yourself these seven questions.

1. If I do this frightening thing, will it bring real quality and beauty into my life?

2. If I do this frightening thing, will it move me further toward the fullest expression of my innate potentialities?

3. Am I respecting my health and life, and the health and life of others?

4. Is this fear really just a misguided attempt to protect my fragile and limiting self-image?

5. Is this apprehension and anxiety simply the death-throes of my outmoded ways of acting, thinking and being in the world?

6. If I took these risks and let go of my old ways of acting, thinking and being in the world, would I be closer to my highest good?

7. Is the larger purpose of my life the realization of my highest good as opposed to being comfortable?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, your fear is telling you something important. You should probably listen. It’s difficult to reach your highest potential if you are maimed or dead, and it’s difficult to manifest your fullest happiness if your actions harm others. But if you can answer yes to even one of these questions, then you should override your fear and take action. And by the way, if you can answer yes to even one of these questions, you are implicitly answering yes to all of them.

Helpful research from the field of psychology shows that our thinking is stuck in two important and debilitating ways. The first is negative thinking. We tend to exaggerate the scale and frequency of negative situations and minimize or overlook positive situations or circumstances. Through tens of thousands of years of evolution, human consciousness has grown highly adept at scanning the horizon, both literally and figuratively, for problems and potential disasters. The individual who most rapidly perceives the impending problem – the crouching Saber toothed tiger, the lethally poisonous snake, the toxic forest mushroom – has a far better chance of survival and passing on his genes. Natural selection rewards caution.

If negative thinking isn’t successfully challenged, the mistaken notion that fearful living equals wisdom takes hold, hindering the necessary risk required in any process of growth or advancement.

The second prevalent mode of consciousness that seems to have grown beyond the bounds of its usefulness is confirmation bias. We exaggerate evidence that supports our preconceived positions and ignore or denigrate evidence that challenges our preconceived positions. The positive aspect of confirmation bias is that in enables us to bond tightly with an in-group that shares our perspective, a dynamic that helps us form close families and tribes. The negative aspect of confirmation bias is that it locks us into a worldview in which accurate and wide-ranging critical thinking is no longer possible. Our fears become dogma – unquestionable truths closed to inquiry and investigation.  

When you put negative thinking and confirmation bias together, you have a serious problem. All manner of evils begin to take shape – racism, xenophobia, nationalism, bigotry, arrogance, and ethnocentrism. In other words, fear becomes the idol before which all must kneel. To move beyond fear means to correct the imbalance and empirical inaccuracy of negative thinking and confirmation bias. An honest assessment of the environment shows that the universe is not a hostile, dangerous field of impending disasters. Yes there are dangers, but the fact remains that we are supported and nourished continually by an uninterrupted flow of abundance. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the light and beauty and love of the world and its myriad creatures hold us aloft in an unbreakable web of being. This isn’t some hippie dream. It’s a measurable fact.

And when we begin to awaken from the illusion of individual and tribal superiority, our natural humility is restored and we begin to recognize that our ideologies and arguments are not universally authoritative – there are other, equally valid ways of understanding the complexities before us and there are other, equally viable ways of organizing society, determining justice and supporting what is best in us. In other words, we move from fearful self-obsession to loving-kindness. A broad and generous smile replaces the narrow, guarded squint through which we had been viewing the world.

And when we begin to view the world differently, the world changes. As the Talmud reminds us, “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”

Breaking free of the debilitating effects of fear is an inside job.

Maybe the first step is to recognize that uncertainty is a necessary precondition for all growth and emergence. How could a seed know what lay above the surface of the soil? Yet it pushes upward anyway. How could a mother know what lay ahead for her and her baby? But she gives birth anyway. How could a guitar player know if this solo is going to be great or an awkward failure? But he throws himself into it with finesse, skill and abandon anyway, trusting the truth that there is no beauty without risk. Becoming comfortable with uncertainty is an essential component of any creative process, especially the creation of a magnificent life.

It was early in the year 1933. America was in the abyss of the Great Depression and genuine hardship was tearing apart the fabric of this once great nation. In the opening lines of his first inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke the immortal words, “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Ten million Americans heard his voice crackling through their radios, and many more read his words in the next morning’s paper. His simple truth struck a chord and sparked a shift in consciousness. The radical notion that fear itself was the enemy – not external conditions no matter how dire – was a message that brought hope into a hopeless world. How powerful it is to consider the possibility that fear, an important ally when carefully and critically managed, can become the most crippling hindrance.