Fresh Choices

Great Explanations x 4: Why not?

Rocks, glaciers, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, or even a wicked wave, any explanation of what gets in my way will do. I am too old to change. I am not ready. It’s too late. It’s too soon. Psychotherapy didn’t work. Neither did confession. I don’t really want to. I have too much to do already. It’s too hard. I would but . . .

????????????Making fresh choices in the white water of everyday life will transform you. But only after you make the change and take a risk in the rapids of routine choosing. Our lives are filled with patterns that reflect what we believe we must do, have to do, should do, and want to do. Challenging the habits – existing strategy – is simple yet almost never easy.?Doing something different on a consistent basis is most often very hard to do. Those of you who have been on more than one diet; more than one budget; or more than one exercise schedule already know this. And yet we are proposing that you will need to do something different to sustain new practices of mind, body, heart and spirit as a condition of making fresh choices that matter.?How can you succeed as rarely before?

???????????Most approaches to strength training – in whatever dimension – offer structure, encouragement, maybe some group support and tactics for persistence as the pull of old habits, comfort rituals, and every day demands steer us back, back, back to the familiar.?

In your ‘action experiments’ you will probably experience some initial success and more than a little frustration with your occasional (maybe frequent) fall off the wagon of new choosing. Some days your commitment will hold true. On other days, you will make another choice.?Maybe you will choose a familiar routine or habit that neglects the good intent of your action experiment. Perhaps you will choose a new way to defeat good intent.

The cost of fresh choices is letting stales choices go. To create and sustain patterns of new action, it is critical to acknowledge the power and persistence of the obstacles, detours, and temptation we encounter along the way.

???????????Writing even a few words about how we sustain stale choices is a means of exposing the secrets of how we stay the same. Exposing these secrets of how we defeat ourselves creates an awareness that is critical to fulfilling the promise of change. The stories we tell ourselves (and sometimes others) of how we can’t run, meditate, sail, work-out, sing, write poetry, cook, play the violin, or dig in the garden are bursting with raw data, false assumptions, unchallenged fears, and self-defeating doubts about moving?forward to overcome rampant denial of our very best selves.

???????????If our plan is to have a strategy that sustains us in growing stronger in our world, it will need to include an understanding of what gets in our way and of how we explain the rocks, glaciers, hurricanes, and wicked waves of white water that we keep on choosing to avoid embracing just those practices that might make us whole. If we want a powerful new personal strategy for growth, it will help to recognize the creativity, intelligence, rationality, kind heart, and deeply human need of how we choose old patterns over new practices every day. Writing our great explanations for not doing will make such not doing much harder to sustain. After all, how many times will you be willing to read about downing a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia before dropping the spoon in favor of doing something new?

???????????What if many of the obstacles that slow us or stop us in our pursuit of new practices and fresh choices are just creative explanations for doing what we prefer to do in the first place? Maybe we procrastinate in service of our purpose. Rather than repeated attempts to remove or transcend the obstacles we encounter, perhaps we need to recognize our part in the choosing we do. Without this recognition of our choosing what we prefer in any given moment, a change in choosing may well prove to be impossible. In our experience, there are four dimensions of choosing that capture more than 95% of the explanations for not doing. It is quite possible to not do relying on several explanations at the same time, but most of us have our own preferred stories to sooth our sorry souls. Knowing the patterns of your own great explanations is critical to that doing that will not require further explanation, to wit.

Dimension 1: Time

???????????Most of us have traded time for calendars – paper, digital, or that amazing organic blackberry in our head that keeps us focused on the right topic, right activity, right place, and right telephone number to the minute most hours of most days. We would make the mad hatter proud. So please take out your calendars of whatever technological persuasion.

???????????Yes, right now. We can wait while you hesitate. (Hesitation is a topic for a later, even less comfortable conversation). Look at your calendar and consider in some detail exactly what you have been doing for the last month, hour by hour, day by day, week by week. These are the choices that reflect your personal strategy for deployment of your most critical asset. Time will be a central feature in many explanations for not doing so having a clear inventory of what we choose to do with time will be critical to understanding the obstacles we create, sustain, or just plain go ‘round and ‘round to stay in the same place.

???????????New practices (or reinvigorating old ones) inevitably take time. If you believe you have identified a preferred practice for building the strength that fresh choices inevitably require, what current activity will you be deleting from your 24/7 calendar of constant doing? What will you be not doing while engaging in this new practice? That’s the rub of substituting fresh choices for stale choices if we accept that all day, every day, we are choosing how we invest our time to align with passion and purpose.

???????????Maybe you simply don’t have the time for fresh choices, no other explanations required.

Dimension #2: Money

???????????In my training as an educator and psychologist I had frequent chance to study, listen, discuss, and write about almost every challenge to the human condition. Depression, incest, anxiety, domestic violence, substance abuse, rape, eating disorders, borderline this and bipolar that, dyslexia, adultery, custody battles, betrayal and the disappointments of daily life were frequent subjects of debate and clinical decision making. And the rage for intrusive mothers and disappointment with neglectful fathers was an endless topic in all classes. We talked and were taught about everything.

???????????Except money. Not once in all those years of training, case conferences, grand rounds, and teaching did this particularly taboo topic get to the table of clinical and profound conversations. Not once. And although every profession has blind spots to be revealed, doesn’t this neglect of money as a topic of more than passing interest seem a little strange, stupid, and sad for those being trained in the psychotherapy trades?

???????????Maybe it was just too intimate a subject to speak of to anyone with candor, ourselves included. In my years of clinical practice, almost all of my patients were more comfortable talking about childhood abuse, paralyzing depression, bottomless grief, or burning rage for endless disappointment in love then talking about money. Speaking of sex was a snap, mostly, when compared to the stuttering mumbling about how money matters in the lives of most people, even for those on the brink of ruin or the cusp of bounty. It didn’t matter, rich, poor, or pressure cooked middle class, mining for the meaning of money was hard rock excavating in the insight enterprise.

???????????So (again), please take out your checkbooks, cancelled checks, investment portfolios if you are so fortunate, IRAs, education savings plan, and don’t forget your most recent credit reports while you are at it.

???????????At my way left of center college in the early ‘70’s, classmates of vegan persuasions would comment that “you are what you eat” as I wolfed down cheeseburgers in endless ? pound increments. Many of us are quite a bit to the right of wherever we were in our younger days, so it does seem only fair to suggest that “you are what you spend” as a barometer of preferred choosing in action.

???????????Some new practices and most fresh choices of real significance require shifts in how we spend money or how we make money or, perhaps, both spending and making must change. This prospect can make the challenge of rescheduling time in support of new practices seem like a pleasure cruise. Money is the lagging indicator – the after the fact measure – of what we really care about, reflecting both strategy and purpose as historical fact absent sentiment that might wish otherwise. To realize your life of fresh choices, how will not spending show up in next month’s register; next year’s financial statement, or tomorrow’s window shopping? How will you be investing your time (see above) to make less (or more) money to sustain the "you" that you would be in 2020?

Or maybe you just don’t have the money for fresh choices either, no further explanation required.?

Dimension #3: Work

???????????Most of us are quick to subscribe to the reflection that Paul Tsongas, the then junior senator from Massachusetts offered (just before dying of brain cancer) that “no one wishes they had spent more time at the office on their death bed”. Of course our subscription to such common wisdom on legacy matters is rarely renewed in the light of the more urgent business of making a living, being successful, feeling important, having a career, and meeting critical project deadlines.?It’s not that we think our death bed would be loud with praying for just one more day to complete another proposal filled with the idiot speak of commerce, academia, or professional punditry. We don’t think that.

No one seeks the engulfing regret for a life lived rich in nonsense, trivial pursuits, or in ‘tales told by an idiot signifying nothing’. Perhaps it is just that we don’t believe that the death bed in question is ours. We work as though we simply don’t believe we will die despite what the odds seem to be. If you doubt the power of denial as the big daddy of great explanations for not doing it may be worth recalling the cautionary tale of the original TV prosecuting attorney, Hamilton Burger, who had the misfortune of always being pitted against Perry Mason. He never won a case.

Years after Perry Mason went into ubiquitous syndication, Warren Tolman made one of the first anti-smoking ads for prime time TV. It was just a head shot of a familiar face, now drawn, clearly very sick with something. He was hard to watch and impossible to turn off. His script was brief and to the point in his prosecution of another case he could not now win. Speaking in a clear but breathless voice he said

By the time you see me on your television, I will be dead. I have been smoking for 20 years and I am dying of lung cancer. Please, I beg you, don’t smoke. If you already smoke, stop.

???????????That was it, brutally brief and exquisitely sad. For those too young to recall, imagine any favorite star delivering the same message before their time. What’s the connection to work as a great explanation under the mantle of death denied?

???????????Follow up research found that the incidence of smoking immediately following this early public service announcement went way up! People changed channels and could not wait to inhale. Death makes us all really anxious and we tend to do whatever it takes to sooth frayed nerves including smoking in this instance. Or working, as a means of denying what will be required to sustain fresh choices or to engage new practices that will build strength more relevant to passion and purpose then to profit. It’s not just time. It’s not just money. It’s how and how much we work that may provide the truly fertile fields for failing in our most authentic pursuits.

???????????But maybe you just have too much great and meaningful work to make fresh choices, at least not now, not yet, maybe some other day will do just fine for signifying something. And then again, maybe not. Time will tell, won’t it?

Dimension #4: Love

???????The things we don’t do for love will not be cured in a page of clever prose. The confluence of romance, lust, commitment, obligation and the glue of shared history is so complicated that any excavation here will prove too shallow. Add children and the primal urge to protect our progeny as we project our identity onto the painting of our purpose and, well, never mind if the cost of fresh choices is clearing up that confusion and chaos.?

???????????But mind we must. Love is the worst excuse for pretending we are no longer free.

I remember the excitement of my once-a-summer family excursion to Chicago’s great (and only) amusement park, Riverview. The asphalt alleys were sticky with spilled coke; the air was filled with the sounds of creaking, rickety rotting wood roller coasters and barkers pitching for nickels a play for suckers; it was all just so seedy. The standards for sanitation and safety were, to be kind, lax by comparison to any Six Flags or Disney enterprise of today We loved it.

There was a ride called the Tunnel of Love with long, fake looking gondolas that wobbled their way around a twisting canal through long, dark tunnels so teenagers too young to drive could have a brief, private place to kiss beyond the prying eyes of parents. (This was the early 60’s; a more innocent time long before ‘hooking up’ was the dating norm for sophomores on the make.) As we left the dusty bank and longing line of holding hands behind, an incessant recording still sounds in my ears. Keep your hands inside the boat. Don’t rock the boat. And then, after perhaps 20 seconds of relative quiet, again that tinny tape of keep your hands inside the boat. Don’t rock the boat. As if we had had time to forget or some insane interest in capsizing over kissing. And as for hands, norms over the years may have changed, but hormones have not, so the whole admonition seemed pretty pointless in that time and place.

In this time and place, however, you will probably need to consider a more perverse prescription for embracing practices and choices that make a real difference in how you choose to live your life. Rock the boat.

When your exposition of great explanations come round to love as the reason for not doing there’s trouble in your tunnel. If your passion in pursuit of purpose is constrained in the name of love, how will you be fueling that fresh choosing that moving forward will require?

But how are we to rock the boat in our tunnels of love without capsizing our lives? Changing direction in mid stream –even by a few degrees – is a risky business in most relationships. The pull to keep balance in our love boats will most often grow and grow to meet the threat of tipping which your fresh choices and new practices seem to promise those you love. That’s just the physics of love. Equilibrium rules, even when the anger of constipated passion fills the canal. So, how are we to rock the boat?

???????????Carefully. Intimacy that does not imprison requires more truth telling than is comfortable for most of us. If you have lost the habit of truth in your most telling relationships, go slowly as you share those choices and practices you think may be necessary. Remember, your choice is a loss for them too, only harder because they are not doing the choosing. Closing the distance from I want to we will can seem improbable and is surely impossible until the conversation is well begun. It takes talk and often a lot of talk to find a new balance where passion can flow together or, at least, find acceptance that your (singular) fresh choice can be a gift to your (plural) shared futures and not of great danger in the present.

???????????Then again, maybe you should just keep your hands inside the boat. After all, what’s love got to do with it??It’s your tunnel.