Fairy Tales and Choices

Dear Ones:

In our work and in our world, we are constantly in the process of saying “yes” to some things and “no” to other things. Whether you’re making these decisions consciously or not, life is a vast network of branching narratives - a “yes” takes you down this path. A “no” takes you down another. Yes, I will take that job. No, I will not compromise my ethics. Yes, I will bend the truth to accomplish a goal. No, I will not put work above my family.?

Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky believes that none of these choices are actually ours to make. In his book “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” he argues that what we view as agency is actually a complex combination of current life circumstance, memory, biological determinants, and hormones. It’s those factors that make the decision for us, even if we convince ourselves that we actually have a say in the matter. If you took that job, according to Sapolsky that “choice” likely had everything to do with your current financial situation and goals, your learned schema around money, power, and status, your activated nervous system, and how much tolerance you have for stress. In other words, the free will to decide whether or not you take that job is an illusion - your body decides for you and you’re just along for the ride.

And while Sapolsky has a body of compelling evidence to support his claims, the fact is that deterministic thinking like this has been shown to worsen human behavior. After all, if I can’t control my thinking then to hell with it all - why even try? Flippant commentary aside, this is exactly what happened in a recent meta-analysis of unconscious bias training. When participants were taught that their biases were hard-wired into them, biased behavior in the workplace got worse. Spreading the message that bias was unavoidable and out of our control caused some people to just give in to their biases. It was only the training programs that included corrective protocols - specific, actionable steps to monitor your biases and change your behavior - that actually reduced bias in the workplace.

Applied to life design, this means that it doesn’t matter if Sapolsky is right or wrong - we all need specific, actionable steps to get conscious to our own decisions and author our own narratives.

But, dear reader, that is far easier said than done.

When it comes down to it, we are storytellers and we weave tales for ourselves that help us feel safe in this world. For many of us, these tales are binary in nature (good/evil, right/wrong, hero/villain) and have a mythic quality that defies logic and data. Tell me if any of these ring true for you:

• It’s me versus the world. If I don’t look out for myself, who will?
• In the long arc of history, good will always win out. Evil may win the battle, but never the war.
• Doing the right thing means I’ll get my reward - eventually.
• The world is just and fair, and if I stay true to myself it will all work out.

That last one is something I’ve been wrestling with lately. More than wrestling with - grieving, actually. In my own work, I’ve found that these stories are so entwined with my identity that to dismantle them I need to grieve them. I choose to mourn the loss of these mythic fables so that I can get conscious to what is real about my experience in this world. The grieving of these stories feels much like any other kind of grief. It’s cyclical and episodic. At times, I’m in total denial that these stories have any hold on me. And then suddenly I’ll be overcome with sadness at having let these stories live rent free in my mind for so long. I find myself angry at the world for threading these stories into my cultural consciousness. And on and on the cycle goes.?

But when I find clarity - that moment of true acceptance - I know that grieving the stories that no longer serve me creates space for the stories I want to author. In the wake of the grief and loss of my childhood fairy tales, here is what I hold to be true:?

• I am not alone - my community supports me.?
• Good and evil are labels often granted by those that write history.
• Doing the right thing means I’m being responsible to myself and my community. Recognition or reward has nothing to do with right and wrong.
• The world is not in balance. There is no scale. All we can do is try and be good to each other and ourselves.

A teacher of mine once told me that while life is not fair, goodness is not rewarded, and right does not always win, we should act with the aspiration that one day these may become true. That’s not to say that we can magic them into existence, but rather that we should choose our actions to create more fairness, more goodness, and more righteousness. We do this in spite of these stories rather than let their fallacy deflate our ability to impact our world.?

We may have free will, or all our decisions might be made for us by a series of biological determinants. But if we get conscious to the stories that drive us and grieve the ones that do not serve us, we can start to shape the narrative of our lives.?

sometimes the grief is so overwhelming that I’m afraid it’s going to spill out of me?

crashing in to the people I love

wiping out entire cities with waves of my regret and longing for what was, what if, and what could have been.

it’s not a singular grief that threatens this

but a collection of the paths not taken and taken from me.

sometimes I get so lost in this maze of past and paths that I even lose sight of the here and now

and then I grieve what I have lost losing that moment.

I don’t know when this grief will subside, but when it does I know I’ll grieve that too.