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Bonds that
Make Us Free, Part 37: The Only Way to Start Afresh
by
C. Terry Warner
Still not quite
convinced? Still thinking Jeff might have been better off bailing
out early in his marriage and finding someone less selfish? Still
thinking he wasted a lot of good years of his life? Still sure he
was called on to sacrifice too much? If so, consider the following
memorable images devised by that insightful Dane, Soren Kierkegaard.
Imagine, he
says, two artists. One travels the world over to find a human subject
worthy of his skill as a painter of portraits. But so exacting are
his standards and so fastidious his judgment that he has yet to
discover a single person worthy of his efforts. Every potential
subject is marred by some disqualifying flaw.
The second artist,
on the other hand, has no special admiration for his own skill.
Consequently, he never thinks to look beyond his immediate circle
of neighbors for his subjects. Nevertheless, he has yet to find
a face without something beautiful in it, something eminently worthy
to be portrayed.
Wouldn't this
indicate, Kierkegaard asks, that the second painter is the real
artist? Yes, he says, because this man "brings a certain something
with him" that enables him to find in others that which is
worthy to paint. The other man could not find anything worthy to
paint anywhere in the world because he did not bring with him this
"certain something."
So it is with
love, says Kierkegaard. Love is the expression of the one who
loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can
love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers
truths about individuals—any individuals—that others cannot
see (see Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love [New York: Harper
and Row, 1962], 156-57).
This same point
can be made in terms of the principle of forgoing. Forgoing the
taking of offense is an achievement of the one who forgoes; he or
she extends it to all, including those nearest by. It cannot depend
upon what others do, or else it is not genuine forgoing.
The lessons
found in the story of two artists bring clarity to what Jeff's story
has taught us. Here's one of those lessons:
Unless we change
in our hearts toward the people we struggle with here and now,
we are condemned to struggle with whomever we may find ourselves
associating with.
It doesn't matter
if we marry a different spouse, take another job, or move to another
country. We will be the same: we will interpret our world
the same way, and others will respond to us the same way. The details
of our days may distinguish them from one another, but their substance
will not change. "Wherever you go, there you are."
Nothing can
change fundamentally until we change fundamentally. We shall
never find a beloved until we become lovers.
This
Is the Best of All Possible Situations?
A second significant
lesson we can draw from Kierkegaard's images:
When it comes
to seeking a change of heart, our starting place must include our
present situation, with the people we live with right here and now.
It is with these very people that we must learn to forgo all taking
of offense.
I have sometimes
called this principle BOAPS—when it comes to seeking and maintaining
a change of heart, we are in the Best of All Possible Situations.
You may be wondering, in a state of alarm, how a principle so startling,
so counterintuitive, can possibly be true. If so, you are not alone.
A woman named Melinda wondered the same thing when I taught the
BOAPS principle in a class she attended. Her husband had kept his
secretary in a nearby apartment, had a baby by her, attended the
birth, named the baby after himself, and put a birth announcement
in the newspaper! Melinda said, "When you said I am living
in the best of all possible situations, my nervous system got a
charley horse. My whole body stuck its tongue out at you."
But think about
the principle: It doesn't say that our situation could not be better.
Many of us have serious needs, like too little to eat or broken
health; even those of us who are fairly comfortable could benefit
from positive changes in our circumstances. What the principle says
is, in matters that can affect our happiness, we are in the best
of all possible situations.
Let me explain
further. We have a special obligation to those with whom we have
been colluding. Since we, by our accusing attitude, have supplied
them excuses for their self-betrayals, we are in a better position
than anyone else to help them change, and we can do so by means
of our own change of heart. Leaving them would be a way of continuing
to accuse and collude with them—to say, in effect, "I can be
happier if I get you out of my life." This does not mean there
are no circumstances that require us to part from former colluders;
for example, as in Melinda's case, from an incorrigibly unfaithful
or abusive spouse. But that is different from abandoning such a
person in order to seek what we fantasize will be better opportunities
elsewhere. Leaving for the latter reason only continues the collusion;
it's an act of refusing to forgive.
You might like
to know that Melinda took the implications of the BOAPS principle
seriously. She accepted her circumstance without resentment and
concentrated upon this point: If she and her husband were to part
because of his refusal to make a marriage with her, and she left
without resentment or recrimination, she would be able to leave
and live freely. Otherwise, she would remain tied to him by bonds
of anguish even if he were to move to the other side of the world.
They did part, because of the choices he continued to make, but
she emerged a person completely free of self-pity, loving her life.
She obtained an advanced degree and became a counselor, and she
has made positive contributions to many people's lives.
We cannot be
liberated from our burdensome feelings toward certain people without
forgiving these very people; without this, we leave unfinished
the task by which we ourselves can be transformed. For wherever
we go, we will remain accusing, self-excusing individuals who, fantasizing,
think a change of circumstance will make a fundamental difference.
Instead of leaving our problems behind, we will take them with us.
When happiness
is the issue, the best possible situation for us is the one we're
in now, and the people around us are the best we could be with.
JOY WITHOUT
FANTASY
We too easily
assume that before Robin's change of heart Jeff must have considered
his situation grim and that he persisted in his marriage by sheer
grit. No, grim is how it would have seemed to a person stuck in
an I-It mode of being. It was not grim to Jeff. Difficult, no doubt.
And challenging. But not grim.
Sunk in our
I-It resentments, we who are self-betrayers reject opportunities
for joy by considering ourselves victims. Then we fantasize about
the joys of which we have deprived ourselves. We think that
if only certain things could be otherwise—if we could earn more
money or change our spouse or move to a better location—then we
could be happy. We're absolutely sure that the one situation in
which we can never be happy is the present one, which is
exactly opposite from the truth!
The story of
the hardened businessman named Norm, introduced in Part 1, illustrates
the two ways of being—grimness and fantasy before his change of
heart, and joy without fantasy after. Norm, you may remember, is
the man so fixated upon his economic success, so thoughtlessly convinced
it would bring him some sort of happiness, that he nearly destroyed
the significant relationships of his life.
His story also
exemplifies other ideas we have studied in this book, especially
the difference a person can make by taking decisive action at the
true choice point. Norm stopped his self-betrayal not by trying
to fight against his lifelong judgmental and brusque tendencies,
but by admitting to himself where he had been wrong and then doing
what seemed to him most right.
To this day,
I consider Norm to be among the most macho males I have ever worked
with—an ex-boxer who had made it big by starting a company in a
very competitive industry. He hadn't been the type who examined
or even questioned his emotional reactions. His style was always
to bull ahead. In the first session of the class he attended, I
told the story of Marty, the fellow who stayed in bed after feeling
he ought to get up and take care of the baby in the middle of the
night. Norm blurted out, "That story doesn't apply to me."
As the others present were discussing the story, Norm interrupted
again with, "I'd just poke my wife and say, 'Hey, your kid's
awake.'"
By the second
session, Norm seemed worried. "This stuff's logical,"
he said. "I can see it in a lot of people I know, like my alcoholic
brother-in- law, but I can't see it in myself. I can't see that
I'm into any self- betrayals, though I suppose I might be."
It's neither expected nor usual for participants in our classes
to disclose themselves so unabashedly, but Norm was not a usual
kind of person.
During the third
session I told a story of a business leader whose primary aim was
to help his subordinates grow as people and to take responsibility
and initiative in their assignments. To the degree he helped them
do this, the profits came naturally. He didn't run roughshod over
people. Before I had finished my story, Norm erupted in his customary
manner: "You just hit my button. You just got to me."
A few minutes later, while someone else was talking, he suddenly
started talking again, as if he was carrying on a dialogue with
himself and we were getting bits of it. "You know when you
talked about that guy who didn't get up to take care of his kid?
And I said his story didn't apply to me?" He paused and then
said, "It applied to me. I always knew, all the time my kids
were growing up, that I should get up and help. I always knew."
From that moment until the lunch break, it appeared that Norm wasn't
tuned in to the class discussion at all. He sat staring into space.
"Let's
go to lunch," he said abruptly. "I want to talk."
So my associate, Duane Boyce, and I sat across the table and heard
a man tell the truth about himself in the very moments he was opening
himself up to it. These are always remarkable occasions. Duane and
I both felt we were in the presence of an unshielded human soul,
standing in a sacred space.
Norm recounted
the poverty of his childhood and his resolve to make money. Money
had been such an overriding passion, he said, that he had abused
people for it, kept himself from having fulfilling relationships
with the people he worked with day after day, and missed participating
in much of his children's childhood. He had told himself his hard
work was for them, although that, he now realized, was just an excuse
for not giving of himself. As people always do at times such as
these, Norm was accepting the truth of what he had been and taking
responsibility for it; and in that very process what he had been
was disappearing.
That evening
over a late dinner Norm reflected on his day. I wrote down what
he said as soon as I got back to my room:
"All afternoon
I've had the funniest feeling, a feeling I'm not used to. I feel
I want to help people.
"At lunch,
when I was talking, my body started relaxing. I was relaxing so
much I had to hold myself up with my arms to keep from sliding off
the chair.
"For twenty-five
years I have had a painful knot at the top of my back, here, right
where my head goes into my shoulders. Twenty-five years, that's
how long I've been running this business. Today, while we were eating,
it went away. It feels really warm there, but not tense."
Several weeks
later, Norm's chief financial officer confided that Norm had been
the poorest executive he had ever met, in terms of understanding
and working with people, but within a few short weeks he had become
one of the best. Norm told us that he had never felt comfortable
speaking in public, and now, in conducting management meetings,
the words seemed to flow out of him, "as if I were being given
the things to say." In his youth he had a photographic memory
that he lost in adulthood. But since that day when he simply admitted
to himself, emotionally, the truth about his life, this ability
had returned. For many years he hadn't slept well because of preoccupations
and worry. But now he wasn't sleeping "because I have so many
great thoughts to think."
But these were
not the things that impressed me most. Instead of taking weekends
to play golf with his cronies, he was working in the yard with the
two children who were still at home or gathering his children and
taking them on trips and enjoying them completely. And whereas Norm
had complained that the people who worked for him were not very
competent—"I just don't have anybody who can take over the
really important responsibilities except myself," he had said—now
he described the amazement with which he discovered how many first-class
people he had. They were responding to the changes in him and showing
that they weren't really the kind of people their former behavior
(which he had provoked) suggested they were. "What am I going
to do with them all? There are just so many top positions in a company
this size."
"I've got
the secret of life," he'd say to people. "I've run into
those people who try to make you feel better about all the crap
in your life by telling you it's natural, it's the way everyone
feels. That's all propaganda. It shortchanges you. The point is
not to tell yourself you're okay when you're not. The point is to
dump the garbage out. I know a person can. If I can just keep feeling
the way I feel now, I won't do what I believe is wrong again for
anything."
LIVING FREE
Norm became
something of a free spirit, and he did it with the very people he
had had so much trouble with before. He substantially freed himself
from the burden of negative emotions, attitudes, or moods that had
made his life so hard to bear. The value of the freedom he attained
is this: by it, his life became more of what it was meant to be—difficult
and challenging, but also, and often, sweet, fulfilled, and joyous.
All of us operate
by some ideal of freedom or other, by which we believe we can make
our lives better. Most of us in our Western culture have been subtly
taught and have come to believe that freedom is being able to get
whatever we desire. It doesn't make any difference if our desires
are self-serving. We think that any prohibitions, constraints, or
obligations that are put upon us block or diminish our freedom;
we want to throw them off. That's perhaps the dominant popular idea
of freedom.
Another widely
accepted idea is that freedom has to do with being able to act contrary
to our self-serving desires. According to this idea, in the
moment between experiencing a provocation or temptation and our
response to it, a choice presents itself. We can give in or hold
back. You would think this the very opposite of the first idea,
but it isn't. Both kinds of freedom leave our self-absorbed condition
basically intact. Both assume that we are self-serving by nature
and unable to change fundamentally. Therefore both kinds of freedom
are defined in terms of what we are able to do. Neither of
them touches on what we are able to be. It is not hard to
see how limited human happiness would be if these were the only
freedoms available to us.
In Part 26
we introduced a third ideal of freedom, one that pins our hope upon
the possibility of somehow remaking or reinventing ourselves. In
this book we have repeatedly talked about the problem that defeats
this hope: Trying to be a different kind of person without undergoing
a change of heart can at best produce only a counterfeit. In spite
of its lofty aspirations, this ideal, like the others, can bring
about only changes in behavior, not a change of heart.
These notions
of personal freedom are all based on fantasy—the fantasy that by
our own wit or power we can somehow relieve ourselves of, distract
ourselves from, or compensate for our bondage to our unwanted, burdensome
emotional condition. That's one reason why most advice on how to
live our lives makes little fundamental difference. Even if we follow
it faithfully, we still carry with us the cloudiness of spirit we
are trying to escape.
By contrast
to this fantasy, freedom from this cloud springs from the most down-to-earth
realism possible. Early in this section we noted that, as self-
betrayers, we paint our world in threatening tones and then fantasize
about fleeing to some other situation that we think will make us
happy. This produces false optimism about our chances for happiness
elsewhere or false pessimism about our chances for happiness here
and now. The point is neither to accept the falsely threatening
world nor to escape it, but to change it—or in other words, change
the meaning it has for us. And that is done by undergoing a change
in how we see the world, which is a change in ourselves.
The world we
respond to and our response to it are one. We choose by our response
whether the world will address us invitingly or threaten us menacingly.
Herein lies our freedom from fear, anxiety, cynicism, and selfishness:
Nothing can harm us emotionally, fundamentally, if we let the truth,
especially the truth about the interior life of others and God's
love for them, write itself upon our souls.
What I've written
stands incomplete. It awaits its completion in your response. I
have stopped short of offering "how to" instructions,
because these would never quite fit your situation. The plans that
will guide your actions will be supplied as you contemplate the
stories and the principles I have shared. No doubt you have already
felt summoned to do certain things in relation to various people
in your life. I am counting on it; this book completes itself in
your "uptake" of it; you serve as its co-author. Books
are lifeless inscriptions on sheets of paper, but your living connections
with others and with God speak to you the living truth. You will
decide the steps you need to take.
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