by C. P. Boyko
You dummy, she told herself. This was surely the point of the whole exercise. This was what they were supposed to discover: that communication was a two-way street, that listening was not passive but active, that body language was half the message, that trying too hard to listen was precisely what prevented you from hearing—that, in Jim Bird’s terms, striving was what kept you from living. Of course! She smiled, then blushed, afraid that Brad would misconstrue her smile. He too, she now saw, was grappling with the eye contact: the effort of not looking away was draining his face and his voice of all expression. What he seemed to be telling her—with eerie, almost sinister dispassion—was that he was tired of hurting women.
“Time’s up! Now who wants to share their insights on this learning?”
As usual, no one put up their hand right away. Margo, having solved the lesson, did not want to deprive the others of a chance to figure it out, and stayed silent.
Eventually they began cautiously to lift their arms, and Ethan lowered his prayer-clasped hands and pointed to them one by one.
“I really enjoyed that.”
“Me too.”
“Excellent,” said Ethan. “Can you tell me why?”
“I don’t know. It was different?”
Ethan nodded, grimly encouraging, like a physiotherapist watching a car crash victim take their first painful steps. “How was it different—anyone?”
“It was more natural.”
“I felt that by not interrupting all the time I could really hear my partner.”
There was a general murmur of agreement.
“I felt that when I was talking I was really paying attention to what I was saying. I was worried I wouldn’t know what to say, but by looking Lottie in the eyes, I was able to concentrate—and it just came to me.”
Ethan beamed. “Because your underself—your true self—was doing most of the work.” His gaze, like a camera zooming out, diffused itself across everyone in the room equally. “By not looking at the outfield or the dugout but keeping our eyes firmly on the ball, by not pushing ourselves towards anything or pulling anything towards ourselves, by not fighting the stream of the now but letting it carry us, we are able to flow—to let go—to let it happen. Excellent! Anyone else?”
“But I didn’t get that at all,” Margo sputtered.
“Hands before ‘ands,’ please.”
Annoyed, she lifted her hand minimally from her lap, then threw it up over her head, but Ethan only went on staring at her expectantly.
“By focusing so hard,” she said slowly, aware that she was plucking her words from nowhere, “by trying so hard to listen, to pay attention, I just … drowned myself out.”
There was another general murmur of agreement, identical to the first.
“Aha.” Ethan smiled imperturbably. “I think we’re up against the difference between effortful focus and effortless focus. Being in the now with your partner is not about trying to listen. It is … about … listening to try. Next time,” he said lightly, as if it were the easiest thing in the world, “relax.”
Already, by the end of the second day, Margo realized that she was at the wrong seminar. She had not, on Sunday night, believed Jim Bird when he had said as much, for that, she assumed, was just a piece of rhetoric. It was like when spies in movies said, Don’t trust anyone—not even me. Their bluntness, of course, was calculated to win your trust.
But now, alone in her hotel room, some of what he had been saying came back to her, with troubling implications.
“The only possible kind of happiness is happiness with who you are.”
“You can’t change yourself—your self is a self, after all! You can only be yourself.”
But that was nonsense. She’d changed herself radically, and often. She was who she chose to be. Her self was what she made it.
She picked up the phone, then put it down. She ran a bath, but let it grow cold. She looked out her window and felt sad. She stood at the window in the hotel bathrobe and looked out at the sky growing dark over the city’s lights and in her mind’s eye saw herself standing at a window in a hotel bathrobe looking out at a dark sky above a city’s lights, and she felt sad. Brad and a few others were having drinks downstairs in the bar but she did not feel like talking to anyone. Her face needed a rest.
She sat on the bed and flipped through the seminar “material” and, for the first time, the Jim Bird books that Danielle had found at the library for her. (As a joke, Margo supposed, Danielle had also brought home The Will and The Won’t, Bird’s old book on Nietzsche; but this Margo had left behind—not so much because she believed Nietzsche had been a misogynist and proto-Nazi (which she did), but because she found it stuffy and unreadable.)
“The drive towards self-improvement,” she now read,
is a disease born out of self-hatred. You can’t desire to improve yourself without desiring to change yourself, and you can’t want to change yourself without hating the way you are. But what does it mean to hate yourself? It means one part of you hates another part of you. In other words, it means you’re divided. And as everyone knows, it’s united we stand, divided we fall.
NONSENSE, she wrote in the margin (in pencil—it was a library book). Then she pulled out her notebook and opened it to a clean page.
“Of COURSE I hate myself,” she wrote. “What self-respecting person doesn’t hate herself? Self-improvement is achieved through self-hatred. As a child, you reached for a hot stove and your mother slapped your hand. And quite right. But if your mother was not around, your body provided its own slap, maybe even more effective: the pain of burning yourself.
“This is how we learn: through pain, through remorse. When we do or say something stupid, or mean, or wrong, we mentally slap ourselves. Or anyway we should. We should hate ourselves, because none of us is perfect. (No, not even little old ME.)”
She put aside her notebook and called home. Luckily, Danielle was still pretending to be non-judgmental about the seminar, so Margo was able to complain without losing face.
“You don’t even get Jim Bird,” she said. “They break us up into ‘connect groups’ and stick us with a ‘connect leader’ all week.”
“I hate it when people use verbs as nouns,” said Danielle.
“I mean, there are three hundred of us, but for twenty-five hundred bucks you sort of feel entitled to—you know.”
“The guy on TV.”
Margo consulted her notebook, where she had jotted down some observations and criticisms that she thought Danielle might find amusing. “Our leader, though, this guy named Ethan. Must be all of thirty years old. He’s very casual. In fact you get the impression he’s playing a not very high-caliber game of Adverbs, and his word is ‘casually.’”
“Artfully disheveled hair?”
“Check. And ‘wild’ eyebrows that he must comb backwards. And he always wears his shirt unbuttoned to the navel. But it’s not very convincing. It’s a very theatersportsy portrayal of casualness. You don’t wear your shirt or your hair like that if you don’t care how you wear your shirt or your hair—only if you want people to think you don’t care how you wear your shirt or your hair.”
“Wait—to the navel?”
“Well he wears a T-shirt underneath.”
“Oh. Thank God. I had this image …”
Margo lay back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”
“Oh, you always hate it at first.”
“What? No I don’t.”
“The first couple of days you don’t know why you came, but by the end of the week it’s the best thing to ever happen to you, it’s changed your life, you’ve turned over a new— Sorry. But it’s true.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said, but was vaguely troubled.
After she hung up, she turned on her laptop and opened her Resolutions file of three years ago. At about the time she had attended the Personal Pursuit seminar, her resolutions had been:
1. W
rite letter to Bertie
2. Learn Spanish
3. Wake up ten minutes earlier (weekdays)
4. Keep hands out of pockets (looks dowdy)
5. LOOK UP new words
6. More quality time with the daughters
7. Be goofier (take self less seriously)
8. Look in mirrors less
9. Exercise exercise exercise! (jogging?)
10. Floss (~3x week MIN.)
She read the list with dismay. Most of these resolutions could have been made last week. In fact, #6 was virtually identical to the #3 of today, and #10 had been upgraded to #7 (though now its demand had been decreased to twice a week). Spanish had been replaced by Norwegian—she had the crazy idea that she was going to translate Ibsen in her retirement—but she had, to date, learned nothing of either language. In fact she had made little progress with any of her old resolutions. She still battled with the snooze button most mornings, pulling herself out of bed at the last possible minute (she’d even tried setting the clock ahead, but, of course, knowing it was ahead, she counted on the extra time). She still had never jogged a day in her life (perhaps that needed to go back on the list?). She still gazed at herself in mirrors as often as ever, which probably only exacerbated her self-consciousness. But if she had been fighting self-consciousness, what about #4? She did not know if she still stuck her hands in her pockets more than she should, but it seemed a ridiculous thing to resolve not to do. But was her current #9 (“Smile with teeth”) any better? She felt an urge to add a new resolution to her list: “Stop making stupid, petty, vain resolutions!”
There was however one significant difference between her list of three years ago and her list of today. Back then her #1 resolution had been “Write letter to Bertie.” Now, of course, it was “Do not call Bertie.”
So she had changed, in at least one very striking way. That was reassuring.
It was funny, though. She could not recall what sort of letter she had been going to write.
Well, she always hated writing letters, so perhaps it had only been something quite inconsequential. A thank-you note for some gift, maybe.
But why had it been #1?
WEDNESDAY.
They crumpled their pieces of paper into balls with the enthusiasm of kindergartners. Ethan drew a line on the floor with his toe and pointed at the garbage can in the corner.
“Toss them on in there,” he said casually, “and we’ll continue on to the next learning.”
The can wasn’t far away; most of the balls of paper went in. Margo, one of the last to toss, missed. She laughed, then felt she was trying too hard to show that it didn’t matter.
“Twelve,” said Ethan, sounding pleasantly surprised. “That’s more than we usually get. This is a good group! Hmm … Tell you what. Let’s try it a second time—crumple up a fresh piece of paper if you don’t want to go rooting around in that old garbage can—and if everybody, I mean all fifteen of you, are able to sink it, we’ll take an early lunch, and I’ll buy coffees this afternoon. What do you say?”
This was fun; they were excited—but no one wanted to throw first. No one wanted to be the first to miss. Margo supposed this was all part of the lesson: You can’t win if you don’t try. And someone would miss, someone would have to be the first to miss. It might as well be her; it would take the pressure off everyone else. So she stepped up to the line and, with a humorous grimace, carelessly threw away her paper ball.
It went in. Everyone cheered. She curtsied.
Sonja, the shy single mom, threw next. It fell short. There were hums of sarcastically exaggerated disappointment and good-natured sighs to show Sonja that it was just a game, that no one really cared.
“That’s okay,” said Ethan, “but you know what? Let’s keep going. If the rest of you, all thirteen of you, get them in, the offer stands.”
In the end, he persuaded everyone to throw again. Altogether, only five went in.
“Sorry, gang,” said Ethan, smiling and shrugging his shoulders impishly to show that this was exactly what he’d expected to happen—that this was, in fact, all part of the lesson. “Well, I think there just might be time for one more learning before luncheroo.”
There were, on cue, a few mock-groans.
“So let’s all sit back down and open our material to page thirty-seven …”
Most of the time, it’s not that we’re not trying hard enough. Most of the time it’s trying too hard that defeats us. Desperation poisons all our efforts:
•We’ve all met that person, at the office or at a party, who wants desperately to be liked. But what’s more unlikable than desperation?
•One person, desperate for a promotion, goes into their evaluation with sweat dripping from their brow. Another person, who doesn’t care whether they get the promotion or not, goes into the evaluation with easy confidence, casual indifference. Who gets the promotion?
•An athlete wants desperately to win, so they clench every muscle in their body and tie themselves in knots with needless tension.
•Your golf game (or squash game or basketball game) is going very well, you’re playing much better than usual—until you notice that you’re playing well, and think desperately: “If I can just keep this up, it’ll be my best game ever!” That’s when, of course, you “choke.”
•You can’t sleep at night. You’ve got an important appointment tomorrow and you really really need to get some shut-eye. The later it gets, the more desperate you feel: “If I fall asleep now I’ll still get five hours.” “If I fall asleep right now I’ll get almost four hours.” “Oh God, I need at least three hours!” But the harder you try to sleep, the more desperate you get, and the more awake you feel.
Desperation—that is, wanting something really badly—is like a fear of dogs. Dogs only attack you when they smell fear. So being afraid of them is the worst possible thing you can do! And wanting something badly is possibly the worst way to get it.
An old adage says, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t—you’re right.” In other words, the confident are successful because they’re confident, and the unconfident aren’t because they’re unconfident. Confidence is always justified—and self-doubt is always justified, too.
Well, you could also say, “Whether you’re afraid of dogs or not, you’re right.” But instead of “dogs,” think “failure.” Wanting badly to win is a kind of wanting desperately not to lose, and is the quickest way to failure.
Let’s face it: You can’t program yourself to be confident. (What could you possibly say to yourself? “Be confident, you loser”?) Confidence and success only come out of your true self in pursuit of its real dreams. To want something really badly and to try desperately to get it is a kind of bad faith, a self-betrayal, a backhanded admission that you’re not completely sure you can get it, or deserve to. But when your true self is chasing after your true dream, the effort is effortless, and there’s never any doubt.
Write down ten examples of things you’ve failed to get or goals you’ve failed to achieve because you wanted them too badly or tried too hard. (Use the back of this page if you need extra space.)
Margo did not believe she had ever wanted too badly or tried too hard; in fact, she did not believe such a thing was possible. All Ethan’s and Jim Bird’s assertions that nothing could be achieved through direct effort only strengthened her conviction that anything could be achieved through direct effort. Because they kept assuring her that she was powerless, she became quite certain that she was omnipotent.
(In the same way, of course, Jim Bird, after reading so many self-help manuals that assured him he was omnipotent—“Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past any excuse to change any and every part of your life in an instant!”—became only more certain that he was powerless. This is often what we do when confronted with an idea that conflicts with one of our beliefs: we exaggerate the idea, and exaggerate our own opposing belief; we make the familiar idea white, and the foreign black
. This makes the new idea both easier and more enjoyable to combat. As Nietzsche said, even bad music and bad reasons sound fine when one marches off to fight an enemy.)
Margo ignored the instructions. She no longer even bothered trying to find the self-empowerment lesson hidden behind the self-acceptance doctrine; she simply wrote down whatever was on her mind. At the moment she did not want to think about the past, or mistakes she’d made, or her regrets. She wanted to think about the future. Wasn’t that what she was here for?
She drew a horizontal line, representing her past, that, at the point of the present, branched into several arrows representing the future. Beside the arrows she drew question marks. Then beside the question marks she wrote down what she saw as all the possibilities.
Travel. (Norway? Korea?)
Acting again. (She had never been happier than when acting. But would this really be a change—or a regression?)
Horseback riding. (She had never even been near a horse. Would she like it? Well, it would be something different.)
Real estate agent. (Her friend Nyla seemed happy.)
Write a novel. (Because none of her plays had been produced in a long time, she believed that theater was a dying art.)
Divorcée.
She stared at this list for a long time.
THURSDAY.
“Your conscious mind,” said Ethan, “is like a dog on a leash. It sniffs this and that and goes running after it.”
To illustrate his point, he sniffed demurely in several directions. There were titters. Margo and Brad exchanged a wide-eyed look.
“But our unconscious mind, the sum of all our deepest wishes and dreams and … what else? Just shout it out.”
“Hopes!”
“Our real self?”
“Life scripts!”
“Desires?”
“Okay, yes, definitely, but what I’m looking for is—”
“Limitations?”
“Fears!”
“That’s it! Yes, the unconscious is the sum of all our hopes and desires definitely but also yes let’s face it our fears, and our fears, let’s recall yesterday’s learning, aren’t necessarily what?”