What If . . .

There isn’t enough room

in your mind

for worry and faith.

You must decide

which will live there.

(unknown)

Tortured - MHopkins - Trim Castle, Ireland © 2014

I passed a neighborhood church with a sign that read:  “Worry is the dark room where negatives develop.”  Something in its message resonated to my core, not because I’m a worrier by nature but because, when I do, the train of “what if’s” can carry me to a dark and fearful place in a flash.  It’s not logical.

Like one of my students who, after nearly making herself sick with worry, suffering from insomnia and a whole host of physical symptoms that mirrored her chaotic mental state, confessed that she was worried that if she didn’t do well on the LSAT she would never be able to buy her own home.  What?  Let’s unravel that thought process; break it down for me.  I insisted.  She explained that if she didn’t rock the LSAT then she wouldn’t get into law school.  If she didn’t make it to law school she would never realize her dream of being a lawyer.  If not a lawyer, she wouldn’t make enough money to support a mortgage payment.  In a world full of homeowners who are not lawyers, it was easy to see the fault in her logic.  But it wasn’t logic that cast such a dark shadow on her thoughts. 

It reminds me of the parable about the young business man traveling along an unfamiliar road in rural America when he was stopped by a flat tire.  He couldn’t find a jack in his rental car, and it was impossible to change a tire without a jack, so he set off on foot for the closest home or business where he might ask to borrow a jack or at least a phone to call for help since his cell phone didn't have service.  As he walked, he imagined his conversation with the homeowner ending in rejection.  “No I don’t have a jack.”  “No you can’t use my phone.” And so on.  At one point, he even had an argument with the man he had yet to meet who had yet to refuse him help.  By the time he arrived at the nearest house and knocked on the door, he was so bent with anger and frustration that when the homeowner opened the door he screamed, “Never mind!” and walked away in search of someone who would help.

Worry, at best, is a misuse of the imagination!  At worst, it is the shackle that keeps us trapped in self-doubt and defeat.  Either you have some control over the situation or you don’t.  If you don’t, all the worrying in the world won’t make it so.  So next time you find yourself chasing that parade of horribles, ponder this:  What if all went pleasingly well?  What if you realized your greatest success? What if most of the things you’re worrying about never happen? 

What if…

Stressing the Vine

When we long for life without difficulties,

remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds

and diamonds are made under pressure. 
― Peter Marshall

People speak of wanting an easy life.  But how many of us really want it ‘easy’?  If our desire was met and we faced only comfort and ease, wouldn’t we soon become bored?  Where’s the fun in life without challenge?  Where’s the flavor without spice?  Where’s the growth without pruning?  Would we not seek to create our own chaos if chaos didn’t exist, particularly where situations have become stale or too readily assured?  I dare say that we would.

Yet we hear so much about how unhealthy chronic stress is for our bodies.  We need only turn on the news or read a health post on the Internet to discover all of the reasons why we should rid our lives of this toxin.  Constantly faced with demands, frustrations, hassles and deadlines, it seems impossible to break free.  But do we really want to break free?  Might this be where the magic happens?

Consider the life of a wine grape.  While it’s true that many agricultural endeavors require nutrient rich soil to thrive, winemakers worldwide will tell you that when it comes to growing grapes for wine, fertile soil is not always the best.  In fact, most California vineyards are planted in soil that would choke the life out of other crops.  Growers look for nutrient poor or even dry soil that drains well because it forces the vines to extend their roots far into the dirt to find sustenance—stressing the vine—and causing them to direct their energy and sugar into grape clusters instead of leaves, which produces small grape berries.  A handful of tiny grapes will be almost all skin and very little juice, which translates into a rich, concentrated color and flavor in the wine.  For these growers and vintners, the stressed grape is the best grape and produces the superior vintage.

Might we also benefit from a bit of stress on the vine?  In our periods of stress we are called to break out of our complacency, extend ourselves beyond the comfort zone, and direct our energy to find ways to thrive even under the most pressure-filled conditions.  We are given an opportunity to turn our negative stressors into positive ones that help us to grow, remain vital and alive.  We learn to think positive and remain hopeful for better days. We discover how strong and capable we are.  And if we stretch, we learn that humor and laughter are the catalysts that lift us out of our oppression and transform us into the most colorful and delicious versions of ourselves, like the wine grape.

So perhaps what we really mean is that we want an ‘easier’ life, every now and then; a break from worrying that a certain wolf may huff and puff and blow our house down.  If an easier life is what you desire then I suggest you can have it, simply by making up your mind to not dwell on factors that you cannot change and, instead, look for ways to set a positive process in motion; and trust that there is a good reason for this.

An Unlikely Pair

I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.

~Abraham Lincoln

“You listen here girl, I don’t know what kind of little lawyer games you think you’re playing, but you’re running with the big boys now!”   He boomed through the phone in response to my letter requesting that he produce certain documents to support our client’s deal.  Red-rage raced through my body, from the scalp down, touching my ears, and setting my chest on fire.  How dare he speak to me this way, this two-bit, good old boy lawyer!

Only two years out of law school, I had been thrown into the fire with this deal to help my client purchase a restaurant and nightclub from a well-known business owner represented by none other than this J. Don Ridell, Esquire, now on the phone yelling at me!  What I wanted to do was rip that guy a new one!  Jump up and down and pound him on the head; tell him that I was a lawyer just the same as he and defend my right to vigorously represent my client. 

Perhaps because we didn’t have the luxury of time to dicker over such trivial things, and I didn’t want to get fired, somehow, I found the will to simply restate my request.  “No games here.  My client wants to buy your client’s business and they want to close fast.  Now my guy wants me to give this deal my blessing and I’m not going to do it until you turn over those stock certificates and the corporate books.”  Click.  He hung up on me. 

I seethed.  I knew I wasn’t over-lawyering this stock purchase.  If anything I wanted to slam on the breaks, take our time; what’s the rush?  But they had an agenda and I knew I would be committing malpractice if I didn’t do some basic due diligence.  So I stuck to my guns and called my client to tell him where we stood. 

An hour later Mr. Ridell begrudgingly called back and told us to be at his office by noon.  I had heard stories of this J. Don Ridell and other rogue lawyers who had had the run of the place long before it became a resort town with high-rise condominiums, nightclubs and top law firms.  A criminal lawyer by trade, he was stepping up to handle a stock purchase for his best client, but until that moment I had never met him or had any dealings with him.  Intimidated, I packed my briefcase and headed to his office.

I saw his boots first, wingtip leather all shined up with some fancy studs on them; and as my eyes traveled up to the top of his six foot-five head, I saw his jeans with matching studded belt buckle and bolo tie—the consummate cowboy, this one—made evermore complete by a headful of white hair and small strips of surgical tape in the corners of both eyes supported by bruised, swollen pockets beneath.  I relaxed a little, breathed deep, somehow comforted by the idea that this big bad man had just had a little cosmetic surgery.  He sized me up in my expensive little lawyer suit and off we went to his conference room, with barely a word between us.

As it turned out, his client didn’t own the stock after all because he had transferred it all to his 20-some grandchildren who were scattered, along with the stock certificates, all over the country.  We wouldn’t be closing any time soon, that was certain, but for the first time, appearances and judgments aside, we began working together to make this deal happen.  

Later, we walked downtown to discuss pay-off of the business loans with the bank, only to return to a locked office.  Brilliant!  What now?  My briefcase and car keys were inside, so I had to stick around and help him break into this one-story-brick-ranch-styled-home-turned-office.  Sure, the ice had thawed between us that afternoon, but I wasn’t prepared to shove his Wrangler-wearing butt through the conference room window.  

There he was, stuck and distressed, bossing me around from that awkward bent-at-the waist-crunch position he was sort of hanging in with one leg touching the office floor and the other bent at the knee, jammed in the window sill by that wingtip boot.  I tried to contain myself but soon lost control to my laughter.  I was laughing so hard and crying and pretty much useless to help this guy.  Then he started laughing too…and farting…there, stuck in the window, which made me laugh even harder; him too.  Yet something in his jolly laughter dislodged him from the window and he fell to the conference room floor.  Within minutes I was in the office collecting my things and thanking him for an interesting afternoon.

We closed the deal—everyone was happy—and a real fondness had grown between Mr. Ridell and me in the process.  But I never saw him again until the year that I served as president of the local bar association, hosting an event for our judges and winding up my tenure there.  He made me cry with his compliment, he actually praised my mind and told me that working with me on that deal had changed him.  He apologized for being such a jerk.

This fabulously crazy encounter between a cowboy barrister and a little lawyer girl became one of my great lessons, again reminded that things are not always as they seem.  We think people are one way and they turn out to be quite different.  We make quick judgments based on superficial things and think we know all there is to know about each other, but we don’t.  Yet if we’re open and willing to be surprised, and laugh at our differences, we just might find ourselves part of an unlikely pair.

____________

** Names have been changed.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

“What you see and what you hear

depends a great deal on where you are standing.

It also depends on what sort of person you are.”

~C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

I saw him standing by the big window, his face fixed in concentration and disbelief.  “Get over here, love.  You’ve got to see this!” 

Certain that he had spotted one of our four-legged friends, I joined him at the window with that sort of stealthy gliding motion I have developed after years of quietly watching, sometimes following, wildlife in this mountain paradise.  I scanned the yard, the creek bank, the massive trees; the space between.

“What is it?” I squinted to sharpen my view.

“There! You see it?” He pointed with his fingertip on the glass.  “I don’t know…it looks like…a dog?  No, it’s not a dog.  What’s it doing?”

I could see it there by the water’s edge.  “What the heck...is that a…oh my, is that it’s tail?  Look at that…it’s standing on its hind legs!”

“It looks...like...a...monkey!  Look at that! Shoot! It's a monkey! Sweetie, get the camera!” He could hardly contain his excitement.

It didn’t make sense!  When have there ever been reports of monkeys in our mountain community?  We knew this, yet there we were having this random conversation while watching a couple of monkeys walking around on their hind legs down by the creek in our back yard.

Just as we had convinced ourselves that we were witnessing something truly amazing, the monkeys cleared the trees.  Our vision no longer obscured, we realized they weren’t monkeys at all.  They were our neighbors!   

Sure they were out of their territory and, true, one need only look at a diagram illustrating the evolution of man to see the resemblance of humans to monkeys and understand our mistake, but how could we have thought for even one second that we had monkeys in our back yard!?!  We laughed so hard I nearly peed in my pants.

That’s the funny thing about perception:  the way we organize, identify and interpret information to understand and make sense of our environment!  When you get right down to it, we’re all walking around on our proverbial hind legs seeing monkeys of some sort.  Sometimes our reality coincides with another’s and we have a shared experience.  Other times, not so much. 

Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch

with reality and he is not, but should instead say,

His reality is so different from ours

that he can’t explain his to us,

and we can’t explain ours to him.

~Philip K. Dick

Maybe we’re all just living in unique worlds, different from each other.  No one else has access to the private world we each carry in our heads, no one else can see or feel what we feel, or understand what we think we understand, unless we attempt to communicate our experience to others, which, even then, may not be understood.  Yet if reality differs from person to person (or at least our perception of it), then how can we really claim any singular form of reality?  Might we speak instead of parallel realities?  

Consider a person with multiple personality disorder.  His reality may be quite different from mine, yet as I learn of the disturbing, even nightmarish, events of his life, I know that his experience is as real to him as my perception of the monkeys in the back yard seemed real to me (however strange and fleeting).  Kind of makes it hard to say “he’s crazy” or “she’s right” or “they’re wrong” when you consider that we’re all just doing the best we can to make sense of the world we live in.

Each of us was once a dream and now we are the dreamers.  In one instance the world is one way.  The next moment, it’s entirely different.  The longer I live the more I understand:  Most of our experience of the world and the people in it  takes place in our minds.

Bridging the Gap

Here's to the crazy ones. 

The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. 

The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules. 

And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. 

Because they change things.

They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough 

to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

~Apple, Inc.

I think most of the time what we really want is a little bit of peace and quiet, a little bit of tranquility, prosperity, understanding, relaxation and just the feeling that we’re okay.  And often what we get is a whole bunch of aggravation, irritation, confrontation, conflict, difficulty, challenge, and, well, one sort of problem after another despite our desire for comfort and ease.  Before we know it, this dis-ease pulls us this way and that in conflicting directions.  So we have to ask ourselves, am I going to take the bait and allow this to consume me, or am I somehow going to rise above it?  Yet, even when we do nothing there’s this nagging feeling that we cannot do what we would like to do about these factors, which exacerbates things quite intensely. 

On the one hand we may feel that we want to make a clear and determined move to do something about “it”—drawing a line in the sand, making a point and saying, no, I don’t want to have this anymore; yes, I want to sort this out; I want to move on from this; I want to clear this up and I want to change something that can’t possibly continue for another moment in its current form.  This desire for change is both admirable and appropriate, because it’s what spurs us into action.  The opportunity for change always exists when we leave the door open. Yet the speed at which change can come about is the unknown factor.  If we push too hard too fast, not only do we face extreme burnout and disappointment, we’re likely to miss something critical to our long-term success; maybe we leave behind someone or something that ought to come with us on the next leg of our journey.  Perhaps we end up with dissent instead of support.  On the other hand, if we do nothing and they do nothing and we just sit around waiting for change to happen, it will most surely continue to elude us.

Keep this in mind as you consider your own goals, resolutions and, perhaps, shortcomings in the new year, and as we look to our leaders to make it all better following the Fifty-Seventh Presidential Inauguration and the swearing in of President Barack Obama to a second term in office.  

Real change—thoughtful change—takes time.  It doesn’t happen without some effort.  The longer I live and the more I experience of the world the more I tend to side with the science fiction writers who have long maintained that time is not necessarily a linear thing.  We see it as something that has a beginning, middle, and an end; we see the past as something to move away from as we step into the future.

But perhaps time isn’t such a straight shot.  Maybe it’s more of a circular thing or a twisty swirly thing and instead of darting ahead, trying to get from where we are now to where we think we need to be by forging the quickest, most direct path forward, we should be looking back to our past, to our history, and re-examining some things that we thought were done, re-reading some case files that we thought were closed, to see what else might be there for us to learn from; with the goal of understanding how by re-writing our history or changing our perspective from what’s gone before we can empower ourselves, individually and collectively, for the future.

So take a deep breath and another deep breath and then one more.  Never mind about moving anywhere quickly.  We must ask ourselves, what can wait?  Why can’t it wait?  What must be handled right now?  I’m not suggesting a course of apathy or retreat, but rather that we pace ourselves and get it right.  Remain calm.  And put our confidence into something that we have every reason to be confident about, namely, about our ability to bring about the right kind of change at the right time.  We may not get it all at once but great change is attainable when we’re committed to finding a solution.