Storytelling

The stories we tell ourselves are enormously powerful. For example:

For most of my life I found myself, on the basis of a single (romantic) encounter or very limited involvement, telling myself a story about “the future.” She was “the one,” we were going to be “forever,” she was “perfection,” we were “amazing” together… all because that was the story I wanted. Those stories were enormous burdens to lay on another’s shoulders, and it warped and ultimately destroyed every “storied” relationship. That led to other stories I’d tell myself: I wasn’t good enough, love wasn’t for me, love wasn’t worth it, my life was over.

I’m learning to tell new stories, now, and I’m trying to avoid telling stories about the future. The stories I tell are more like this: “What a nice evening.” “This is an awesome moment.” “I’m happy right now.” “This feels good.”

These stories are short stories, but they’re true stories. They’re stories about the moment. They leave space for the possibility of love, even of mutual love, but they don’t assume it and don’t place an undue burden on another or myself. And I find these short, true stories make disappointment a lot less bitter, because I'm not invested in an entire narrative arc.

The future is unwritten and unpredictable. Staying in the moment helps me deal with uncertainty, far better than does constraining it to my self-serving narrative. I want that brass ring relationship and I’m wide open to it, but I’m not trying any longer to make any encounter fit some script. If it comes, it’ll come as a natural consequence of the episodes we write moment by moment, encounter by encounter.

As with everything else in my current life, this is a practice. It isn’t an achievement I unlock by winning a boss battle, it isn’t a destination I reach after a journey: it’s a routine, a discipline, a practice. I start wherever I am at any given moment and do what is in me to do, and that is sufficient.

It matters, what stories I tell. The stories I tell are the meaning I make of my experience, my existence.

Life is less like a symphony, more like jazz, less like a play and more like improv. And that’s awesome!

Not Without Ambition

It’s such a human thing, to set goals and select destinations. “I’m going to lose 10 pounds,” or “I intend to retire at age 55,” or “I plan to visit all the inhabited continents on the earth” vie with perhaps more lofty examples like “I will be kinder,” or “I just want to be happy,” or “I will achieve enlightenment.” And maybe it isn’t such a bad thing that we set goals and select destinations, only…

Only what if you actually achieve them? What happens after you lose 10 pounds or achieve enlightenment? What do you do if you actually succeed?

If you’ve ever dieted to “lose 10 pounds,” you know what happens after you succeed. Usually, you gain back the 10, plus a dividend. Never having achieved “enlightenment,” I can’t really speak to that particular goal, but in general it has been my experience that accomplishing a goal—be it weight loss or being happy or whatever—does not always mean keeping its product, nor will we necessarily be satisfied even if we do. the achievement or accomplishment often feels hollow, and we’re left asking, “Is this all there is?”

My dad took early retirement from the school district that employed him as a teacher. He loved teaching (and to this day I run into former students of his who tell me how significant he was in their academic lives), but found himself at odds with out-of-touch administrators and foolish policies; retiring was a matter of principle, and Dad was always a man of principle. He retired without a qualm and didn’t look back, but for a while after, things looked a little iffy. One of the smartest men I’ve ever known, but he didn’t seem to know quite what to do with himself. He had achieved a milestone, but didn’t know where to go after. Eventually, he decided to serve the public in elected office (water board), and all was well.

That’s the trouble with goals as we usually think of them: they mark the end of striving, and it’s the striving itself—the journey, rather than the destination—that fulfills us. The outcome and the action taken to achieve it are inextricably linked for us; when we stop acting, the outcome recedes from us.

Almost accidentally, I’ve found an answer to this quandary. Instead of framing my ambitions in terms of accomplishments, I articulate them as practices: actions and consequent outcomes as a series of ongoing disciplines or journeys, not as actions that end when the goal is achieved. “Losing 10 pounds” becomes “living healthy,” “wanting to be happy” becomes “living a happy life,” and “achieving enlightenment” becomes “always seeking greater enlightenment.”

I’m discovering that the best way to be happy is to “do” happy: to always be doing what makes me happy, to always be choosing what makes me happy, to always be seeking greater and richer and deeper happiness.

There’s no end to a practice, and that’s a good thing; it reduces the pressure to “get it,” and makes it easier to celebrate progress. After all, it’s in growing toward the sun that a tree becomes a tree; it’s the journey that makes the hero, and not the journey’s end.