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…

Stepping Into the Future

The future is something which everyone reaches

at the rate of sixty minutes an hour,

whatever he does,

whoever he is.

~C.S. Lewis

Mooghaun Hillfort - Dromoland, Ireland
(MHopkins 2013)

People speak of “putting the past behind us”.  But where else can the past be put?  It has only one place it belongs and, once there, can only be a reference point for the future.  Yet we make it a part of our present by clinging so tightly to our experience.  We go round and round in our heads, remembering some conversation, slight or injustice, real or imagined, and we stay stuck in that feedback loop reliving it again and again, often exaggerated and out of context because now we’re focused on some isolated aspect of our otherwise fading memory, giving it life, meaning and a whole host of expressions that perhaps never were.   Imagine what we miss while running around the same tired circles!

Can you see it?  How clinging to an aspect of our past might prevent us from seizing something wonderful that is available to us in the here and now?  Consider this: 

A new form of clinical psychology known as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) stems from the understanding that a great deal of our psychological pain comes not so much from the experience itself, but from the words we use over and over to describe our experience.  Instead of getting stuck in our heads and avoiding any real forward movement, ACT encourages acceptance of the situation, conscious choice of direction and action, bringing more meaning and psychological flexibility into our lives in the process.

In his book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life, author and ACT co-founder, Steven Hayes, suggests that we can actually repeat a troubling word or concept over and over until it loses meaning and power in our lives.  Take the word grass, for instance.  Hayes recommends repeating the word over and over for 49 seconds.  Grass, grass, grass, grass, grass, grass…  The theory is that at some point, your mind will stop associating ‘grass’ with the luscious green stuff and observe it as a meaningless noise.  This disconnect between words and reality will allow us to drop those mind movies that have been tormenting us.  Why not give it a go,  beginning with ‘grass’ or some other word of your choosing and then moving on to the more emotionally charged descriptors that unnerve you, like ‘rejection’ or ‘failure’ or ‘broke,’ or any other parade of horrible that you can conjure.  The idea is to rub out the sting these words carry so that you can deal with life free from the fear created by your internal dialogue from the past.  Sound feasible? 

Diagnosis, they say, is half the cure.  But we’re best careful with how we use our diagnosis lest it becomes the story we tell about our life, the reason for why we can’t have or be or do what we want.  For just as understanding the root of our problem paves the way for setting it right, so too can it provide a ready excuse for not living our best life.

Is there something that you’re ready to put down, let go of, and leave behind?  Are you ready to reach for something new and make it real in your life?  As you move into a great new year, now is a perfectly fine opportunity to trade what torments for something more solid and real so that it becomes part of your future.

Wishing you all the best in 2014!

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.