Talking About the Problem

Talking about fixing problems… is not the same as actually addressing them.

Yes, talking about strategy is important.  It should also not be confused with the action, the actual fixing.  

Here may be the hard part: Talking about a problem, finally getting it out in the open can feel good.  A sense of relief follows.  But if we let the tension of the moment drain all the way out, we will never do the thing we said we would do.

Lurk or Lead

At work, at church, in your family, or online… Do we typically lurk (that is, sit in the back without interacting, watching what other people do) or lead (by connecting with one or more people, by starting a conversation about what is important)?

Lurking is easy to fall into.  It can be scary to speak up, especially in the presence of a difficult problem.

But difficult problems are the only ones that are left.  All of the easy ones are taken.

And so, leadership, not lurking, is really what we need from each other.  

What does leadership look like?  To risk having the generous conversation, to offer the next best idea to move the issue forward.  To see someone as they are (and not as we want them to be), and then inviting them to be generous as well.  

Leadership does not have to be loud or in front of everyone.  We can lead from any chair in the “orchestra” of a community… as a conductor, an oboist, or the person who stacks the chairs at the end of the day.  We each see something important and can make things better.

We need to lead, not lurk.

Mistakes Were Made but Not by Me

Mistakes were made (but not by me) is a delightfully devastating book chronicling the human tendency to avoid responsibility, to self-justify, to make ourselves look good.

Seen in one way, it lays bare our compulsion to try to control our own sense of goodness.

Holiness, by contrast, consists in coming to realize that: 

(1) we are, truly, not any better than anyone else and are quite capable of petty and destructive behavior.  

(2) we are, in fact, very, very good… much more so than we could ever manufacture by ourselves, and that unique goodness is a wildly extravagant gift.

Seeing this frees us to avoid the exhausting dead end of a life lived out of the “mistakes were made but not by me” mantra.  

So freed, we are able to see that (and talk about how) we participate in a system that is not functioning as well as it could.  And then we can ask: “How can I help?” “How can I show up in generosity, bravery, and love to participate (better) in this system?”

The answer to these questions may likely consist in doing less things, but seeing more deeply.

The Blitz

From September 1940 until the following May, in a period called “the Blitz,” German bombers dropped thousands of tons of explosives on the city of London.  

Eight million Londoners moved in shelters and subway stations to avoid the destruction of these raids.

And from that time, there is data to suggests that mental health in London improved.

“Not only did these experiences fail to produce mass hysteria, they didn’t even trigger much individual psychosis. Before the war, projections for psychiatric breakdown in England ran as high as four million people, but as the Blitz progressed, psychiatric hospitals around the country saw admissions go down. Emergency services in London reported an average of only two cases of “bomb neuroses” a week. Psychiatrists watched in puzzlement as long-standing patients saw their symptoms subside during the period of intense air raids. Voluntary admissions to psychiatric wards noticeably declined, and even epileptics reported having fewer seizures. “Chronic neurotics of peacetime now drive ambulances,” one doctor remarked. Another ventured to suggest that some people actually did better during wartime.”

Tribe by Sebastian Junger (pages 47 and 48) 

Wild, right?

So, certainly, the paragraph above does not describe everyone’s experience of violence.  War is not a good time.

It does make me think, though, that meaningful, communal struggle actually does make us happier, in the long run, than lives oriented around individual comfort.

Instead of constantly rearranging our lives to make them more pleasant, let’s seek lives of responsibility and active love.

Children Are Capable of Depth

My life is blessed with ample evidence of the depth of the interior life of children, and I know that I want to center the recognition of this reality in my life.

And yet!  It is easy for me, in the daily churn, to forget this depth and / or to act like I have not known it.  I need help to remember.

Recently, this excerpt from a wonderful book has made it very difficult to forget.  I include the excerpt below.  It is a bit longer than I typically write, and absolutely worth it.

“The Boston Philharmonic had scheduled a fall performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, and because ot the extraordinary difficulty of the music I decided to send a tape of the piece out to every member of the orchestra, so they could get to know it over the summer. One of our violinists, Anne Hooper, took the tape with her to an island off the coast of Maine, where she was visiting with her family, and played it on her boom box.

Her five-year-old niece, Katrine, stopped to listen for a while and then asked, “Auntie Anne, what is this music about?” Anne set out to weave a wondrous tale for the little girl, telling her a story about a wild and fearsome dragon and a beautiful princess who is locked up in a castle. For the duration of the ninety-minute symphony, Anne spun her tale of the princess and her handsome prince.

The following day, little Katrine asked to hear the music about the beautiful princess again. So once again Anne put on the tape and let it run its course, only occasionally reminding Katrine of her invented story line. 

When the piece was playing for the third time at Katrine’s request, about halfway through she asked, “Auntie Anne, what is this music really about?”

Anne regarded her five-year-old niece with astonishment, and then began to tell her the true story of Mahler – how sad his life was, how he’d lost seven brothers and sisters from sickness during his childhood so that the coffin became a regular piece of furniture in his house. She told Katrine how cruel his alcoholic father had been to him, and how frightened his invalid mother. She told her that Mahler’s little daughter had died at the age of four, that he never really got over that loss, and that he’d been forced to quit his important job at the famous Opera House in Vienna because he was Jewish. “And then, just before he wrote this symphony,” Anne said, “Mahler was told by his doctor that he had a weak heart and only a very short time to live. So now, Mahler was really saying good-bye to everything and looking back over his life. That is why so much of the music is so sad and why at the end of the piece it dies out to nothing, its a description of his death as he imagined it, his final breath.”

Anne went on to explain that Mahler wasn’t sad all the time.  He was a great lover of nature and a powerful swimmer and he loved to walk. He had a magnificent laugh and a huge love of life,

and all this is in the music too, as well as his sadness and anger about his illness and the brutality of his father and the vulnerability of his invalid mother. In tact, Mahler thought that he should put everything in life in his symphonies – so anything that can be imagined can be heard in them if you listen carefully enough.

The next day, Katrine came running up to her aunt and said, “Auntie Anne, Auntie Anne, can we listen to that music about the man again today?” Well they did, and again the next day, and in fact Katrine’s parents told me that she listened to it nearly one hundred times that summer. The following October, the entire family made the four-hour drive from upstate New York to Boston to hear our performance in Jordan Hall. Katrine sat wide-eyed through the whole piece. Later, she wrote me a thank-you note.

I carry this note with me everywhere I go.  It reminds me how seldom we pay attention to, or even look for, the passionate and the extraordinary in children…”

The Art of Possibility, pg. 44-46

Ticker Watching

Have you ever seen one of those cable news finance shows with the stock ticker running on the screen?  They are tough to watch for any length of time.  There is a LOT of information (paired with emotion-laden narratives spun from that information).

XYZ is up! (But for how long!?)

ABC is down!  (Catastrophe! And then HIJ said this thing about LMNOP!)

Sometimes, we do a similar thing with our inner lives, “ticker watching” how happy we are at any moment.  We survey and analyze everything that happens through this narrow “happy” lens until we are so exhausted we cannot find the happiness we sought in the first place.

Better to suspend this hyper-analysis, orient our interior life to a longer time horizon, and live more deeply into the experience of active love. 

This will lead to places that do not look “happy” at first glance, but ultimately to a deeper joy, more durable contentment, and lasting peace.

Conspicuous Freedom

Conspicuous consumption is exhausting.  Its fruits are more restlessness, more false needs, (and so) more consumption.

This is probably not what we actually want.

“Nope.  I’m good.  I don’t need [that one more thing].”  

The freedom that springs from this attitude is attractive… more attractive in fact than whatever would have been conspicuously consumed. 

Blindspot

Take a look at this picture.  

From pg. 81 of the wonderful Thanks for the Feedback by Stone and Heen

It is a diagram of what is happening when we do something and someone reacts to it.  Pretty basic interaction, right? 

Not at all! It is so complicated!

It turns out, that it is remarkably difficult to see our behavior (and the impact that it has) objectively.

Yes, we ideally have access to what is inside the left-hand, smaller circle… “my thoughts & feelings” and also “my intentions,” though even these are not always accessible to us depending on our inner state!

And then, we have partial knowledge of our behavior… partial because it is so hard to perceive our facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice.

And unless the other person chooses to share, we have no visibility on the things solely in the right-hand circle: “my impact on them” and “their story about me.”  These form the basis of their feedback.

Our relationships (and so our life) get better when we have more visibility on our behavior and our impact on others.  

So, where to start? 

1. Mindfulness practice – This deepens and refines my perception of and receptivity to all of the inputs in the graphic. 

2. Taking myself less seriously – Humor (particularly the self-deprecating kind) lowers the stakes for the person who might take the risk to clue us in on what we are missing.