PART TWO

Let Go of the Shore

Know that the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore.
Push off into the middle of the river,
and keep our heads above water.

Eagerness

A supernova is a stellar explosion that occurs
at the end of a star’s lifetime, when its nuclear fuel
is exhausted and it is no longer supported by the
release of nuclear energy. Supernovae are extremely
luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often
briefly outshines an entire galaxy before fading from view over several
weeks or months.
During this short interval, a supernova can radiateas
much energy as the sun could emit over its life span.
F.W. Giacobbe
Astrophysicist

It’s hard to find fault with eagerness. It seems like such a good thing— people motivated and eager to get to work, take on a project, change their lives.

But not too far down the road, eagerness shows its ugly side. People become so committed to their cause or work that they become missionaries. They want everyone to work on this particular issue, or do this diet, or follow this plan that will change your life.

People also can let their commitment to being of service grow into exaggerated heroism. They’re willing to take on any problem you give them. They keep looking for the next great cause. They seem unstoppable in their motivation and energy. “Bring it on!” is their life slogan.

Such people are like supernovas—great clouds of fiery, burning gasses that appear powerful and beautiful, but are actually already dead. They’ve exhausted their energy, blown themselves up and what we’re observing in the night sky is just their last gaseous remains.

Eagerness is a good place to start, but its propensity for unfettered growth requires vigilance. Like a parasite, it tends to kill off its host.

It’s not a bad thing when our eagerness fades and we find ourselves just doing the work, bored at times, motivated at others, working day-by-day on little tasks, hoping that some of what we’re doing is useful, but not really sure.

It’s good not to be a supernova.

Fearlessness

Just being with your fear,
just being it,
is the most powerful form of fearlessness.
Jerry Granelli
Musician

Human history is filled with stories of countless people who have been fearless. If we look at our own families, perhaps going back several generations, we’ll find among our own ancestors those who also have been fearless. They may have been immigrants who risked to find a better future, veterans who courageously fought in wars, families who endured economic hardships, persecution, slavery, oppression, dislocation.

We all carry within us this lineage of fearlessness.

There’s a difference between courage and fearlessness. Courage emerges in the moment, without time for thought. Our heart opens and we immediately move into action. Someone jumps into an icy lake to save a child, or speaks up at a meeting, or puts themself in danger to help another human being. These sudden and heroic actions, even if they put us at risk, arise from clear, spontaneous love.

Fearlessness, too, has love at its core, but it requires a great deal more of us than instant action. If we react too quickly when we feel afraid, we either flee or act aggressively. True fearlessness requires that we take time and exercise discernment. Then we can move with love into right action.

Fearlessness demands that we take time to look at whatever feels threatening to us in all its complexity. We step into the fear, into the moment, and watch how by acknowledging and moving closer, fear dissipates and fearlessness arises.

In the Tibetan tradition, fearlessness is known as an act of ultimate generosity, one of the great gifts we offer others.

Righteous Anger

Anger gives the illusion of clarity. A certains
trength arises when we have an opinion and we know where we stand.
The difference between the clarity we believe
we have when angry and the clarity that results from
actually seeing clearly is that aggression has its own
narrow logic, which does not take into account the
deeper level of causes and conditions that
surround each situation.
Dzigar Kongtrul
Buddhist teacher

Anger is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It’s important to remember this in this age when we have an abundance of anger available everywhere. So many people are angry about so many things and at so many people. Anger has become not only tolerated, but expected. Perhaps even respected.

Some anger seems well deserved—we call it “righteous anger.” Confronted with injustice, genocide, dehumanization, oppression, (the list goes on and on), we have every right to be angry. And this is true—we should be angry and horrified.

Some people are motivated by anger—their sense of outrage seems to energize them and propels them to join ever more causes.

But just how far can anger carry us? And where do we end up? Anger is a primary cause of burn-out and depression. It doesn’t give us energy. It eats away at us and makes us sick—there’s no nourishment coming into our bodies, such as is so readily available when we feel peaceful, centered, generous.

Anger also clouds our perception. We can see victims, enemies, immoral acts from far off. But what are we missing with our telescopic rage?

Anger separates us from solutions to the problems that make us angry. We can’t see the people we need to involve and the information we need to know if we are to resolve any of these terrible situations.

There’s no such thing as righteous anger.

Anger in any form only makes us blind.

Urgency Urgency

At one community meeting, we ran into a high-conflict issue. We ran out of time and agreed to postpone this issue until the following week. All week, emotions ran high and opposing views intensified. We eagerly assembled at the next meeting, impatient to get this issue resolved. This was a Quaker community—each meeting began with 5 minutes of silence. On this day, the clerk announced that, due to the intensity of this issue, we would not begin with our usual 5 minutes of silence. We all breathed a sigh of relief, only to hear her announce: “Today, we’ll begin with 20 minutes of silence.”
Story told by Parker Palmer
Educator and writer

Urgency is the unavoidable companion of crisis. It seems to be a valuable relationship—crises demand immediate attention and response. Often, the more we know about a situation, the more urgent we become. We have to do something now! Our concern and love needs to be instantly translated into action, otherwise it will seem we don’t care.

When we work from this place of urgency, we set ourselves up for failure. We work very hard, push our agenda, get aggressive when we think we need to, and end up more exhausted than effective.

And we get angry. Anyone who doesn’t respond immediately becomes our enemy. They may actually be wise people who caution patience, who have a longer-term perspective. But we can’t hear their wisdom or experience; we’re too anxiously engaged in our cause. We hastily judge them as being in denial or just looking for an excuse not to get involved.

Those who advise proceeding more slowly are not the problem. Our aggression is. Captured by a sense of urgency, we create categories—those for and against us, those who get it, those who don’t. Enemies proliferate. As they increase in number, we respond with greater ferocity. We have to fight even harder because there’s so much opposition to our just cause.

This is the predictable cycle of urgency. Because things can’t wait, we fall into bad behaviors: we proceed full force, shoving people out of the way ignoring signals, refusing to behave more moderately or modestly. Instead, we martyr ourselves for the cause and fight back with ever greater intensity. In all this ferocious activity, we fail to notice that it’s our own behaviors that are intensifying the opposition.

Stop.

Urgency leads nowhere except into the wilderness of aggression and failure. It doesn’t serve our cause. It doesn’t serve anything.

Lost

Not being lost is not a matter of getting back
to where you started from;
it is a decision not to be lost
wherever you happen to find yourself.
It’s simply saying, “I’m not lost, I’m right here.”
Laurence Gonzales
Author

When we are overwhelmed and confused, our brains barely function. We reach for the old maps, the routine responses, what worked in the past. This is a predictable response, yet also suicidal.

If we keep grasping for things to look familiar, if we frantically try and fit new problems and situations into old ways of thinking, we will continue to wander lost and eventually collapse from our confusion. There is no way to get out of this wilderness except to acknowledge that we’re lost.

Recognizing our situation usually leads at first to even wilder grasping after old solutions. Yet there’s nothing we can learn about this strange new world until we stop grasping, pause, calm down, and look around. The first thing we could notice is the most essential: we’re still here. This in and of itself makes our situation workable. We don’t have to panic about our situation— we need to acknowledge it. Yes, we’re lost. But in truth we’re not. We’re right here.

As we relax enough to tune in, we’ll be able to notice the information and signals that are everywhere around us. There’s sufficient information right here to help us find our way out. But we have to be willing to stop, to listen, to admit we don’t know.

To navigate life today, we definitely need new maps. Our old ones confuse us unendingly. These new maps are waiting for us. They’ll appear as soon as we quiet down and, with other lost companions, relax into the unfamiliarity of this new place, senses open, curious rather than afraid.

The maps we need are in us, but not in only one of us. If we read the currents and signs together, we’ll find our way through.

Non-Denial

Only she who is ready to question,
to think for herself, will find the truth.
To understand the currents of the river,
he who wishes to know the truth
must enter the water.
Nisargadatta
Indian mystic, born 1897

Looking reality in the eye is an interesting experience. Often, people are startled to realize how much information they’ve been avoiding, and how much information is out there, waiting to be useful.

“Facts are friendly,” a psychologist once said, but most of us don’t see it this way. We move away from all the information that’s available, we retreat into denial. It’s the way we keep our world intact and avoid being challenged or threatened. If we can just hold onto our opinions and views, the world will continue to work just fine, thank you very much.

We get led into the practice of non-denial by failure and defeat. When we have no choice, we seem to get curious. When our back is against the wall, finally we’re willing to look at all the messages we had avoided. This isn’t a graceful process. But when we’re ready to open to the signals, guidance, and information that have been swirling around us, ignored and unnoticed, it’s amazing what we learn.

And it’s remarkable what capacities we develop. Absorbing these messages, we suddenly see things differently. We discover solutions not available from our former position. We experience surprise, sometimes delight, sometimes despair that we didn’t notice things earlier. But the end result is that we become more open, more engaged, and more intelligent.

We learn where we are. From here, much more is possible.

Self-Deception

Anything more than the truth
would be too much.
Robert Frost
Poet

Being honest with ourselves is part of the practice of non-denial. Trying to see ourselves without deception becomes especially important if we’re engaged in serving the world. The world has such great needs, and we truly want to help. It’s hard not to develop a myth about ourselves and our capacity to keep going—a false self-assessment bound to get us in trouble.

Our personal myths blind us to knowing what we can and can’t do. What are our limits? How much more work, how many more causescan we realistically take on? How exhausted are we? What signals from our bodies are we denying? How much longer can we keep this up? Do we think we’re doing just fine playing the lone hero?

And finally, why are we afraid to ask these questions? Do we feel that once we see the truth we’ll just run away or withdraw or abandon everything and everybody?

Of course, seeing clearly who we are in this moment—our health, our motivation, the messages coming from our world— gives us the information we need to continue on.

Just not in a self-destructive savior mode.

Back and Forth

It was like this:

you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

Jane Hirshfield
Poet

We move between extremes feeling
                                                       great then terrible
                 energized then exhausted
                                     successful then a failure
                                                    accepting then resentful
         peaceful then angry
                                     joyful then despairing.

These shifts don’t mean much. Every emotion comes and goes, often followed by its opposite. Just wait a bit, and you’ll see your emotions change. They’ll change if you let them, if you don’t get all tangled up telling yourself a story about why you feel this way.

We don’t have to take our emotions so seriously

We don’t have to act on them.

We don’t have to give them so much power over us.

We don’t have to hold onto them or be fascinated by them or give them any more than brief attention.

Emotions come and go—this is our human experience. If we wait a moment, if we pause and don’t act right away, this too will pass.

Middle

It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.
William Stafford
Poet

We live in a world of extremes and polarities. People take positions at the far edge of an issue, and then scream across the distance they created. Others, numbed by every-day experience, seek out extremes in sports and personal challenges.

Living at the extreme consumes enormous resources. We spend energy on justifying our position, on attacking our enemy on defending our ground, on protecting our position. Or in the case of extreme sports, we devote huge amounts of time and resources to training and preparing for the ultimate challenge.

Somewhere in all the furor and drama, we’ve lost sight of the middle. Yet it’s in the middle where the possibilities reside. Some call the middle “compromise” or “consensus”—terms which have come to mean failure, mediocrity and loss. We don’t remember meeting in the middle as anything but negative.

Perhaps because we’re so addicted to strong emotions and loud noises to motivate us, we no longer seek the quiet space of center. But all great spiritual traditions speak of moderation, harmony, balance—the middle way.

One way to rediscover middle is to notice your everyday behaviors. Notice where you’re positioned on an issue important to you. Are you sitting out on one side, justifying your behavior, assuming you’re right and others are wrong? Or are you open to the possibility that you can’t see very well from where you’re sitting, that you don’t know all the facts in the case?

Humility and curiosity is what shifts us to center. Just by being curious, we move toward the middle ground, with its fertile promise of new ideas and new relationships.

Everything Changes

Yin-yang is the ancient Taoist symbol of life, the dance of opposition that creates wholeness, the dance that never ends. This timeless symbol depicts not only the dance, but the relationship between opposites, how opposition works.

One state gives birth to the other. Whichever state is here this moment, we can be sure that what’s coming next will be its opposite.

The symbol also describes a subtle but essential dynamic of life. When a condition reaches its fullness, when its dominance is at maximum power, it’s then that its opposite state begins to emerge.

At first, the new birth is just a sliver, a new moon glimmer of the future. But the dominant will now begin to wane, and the new will grow. Eventually, it too will become the overbearing present and it too will give birth to the next newness.

In this way life’s ceaseless dynamic of change offers hope and caution simultaneously. Everything changes. Good times don’t last forever. And neither do bad ones. Whatever is happening now, good or bad, is giving birth to the next state, which will be its opposite.

Does knowledge of this dance help us persevere?

No Big Deal

If you maintain a sense of humor and a distrust of the rules laid down around you, there will be success.
Chögyam Trungpa
Buddhist teacher

Most people have had the experience of being focused on something that seemed incredibly important, such as deciding what to buy or choosing what color to paint a wall, then suddenly having that dilemma swept away by learning that someone they love is seriously ill.

This instantaneous shift in priorities applies to nearly every situation in life, even the current crisis that’s overwhelming you right now, that feels so critically important to resolve now.

Today’s crisis is guaranteed to shift and change. We can count on this. Without any help from us, situations lose their “big deal” status, shoved aside by the next crisis. In part, this is evidence that we live in a constantly changing universe. But it’s also true because we live in a leadership culture that seems addicted to crisis. Too many leaders want to know about every little crisis, yet never focus long enough on any one to resolve it. So why should we be the ones making it into a big deal right now if tomorrow it will be demoted or forgotten?

“No big deal” is an attitude that serves us well in life and in work. But it’s important to note what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean being numb to what’s happening or what demands our attention. It doesn’t mean shrugging our shoulders and walking away. It doesn’t mean saying, “Oh well, that’s just the way it is.”

We absolutely need to pay attention to crises and issues, and we need to be fully engaged with them for the long-term. But we don’t need to over-inflate the issue in a way that obscures clear seeing and right action. We don’t need to fill the crisis with urgency, which only promotes confusion and aggression.

In the greater scheme of things, this current crisis truly is no big deal. With that recognition, we can do very good work.

Destination

If you can’t get destination,
go for direction.
James Gimian
Publisher

Most of us think we know where we’re going. Or at least we think we should know where we’re going. We may have been taught about goal or intention-setting, perhaps even about planning and strategic thinking.

Knowing where we want to end up seems essential. As one wit said: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you may just end up there.”

But once we know what our destination is—in life or love or this project— we too easily get trapped by desire. Holding our hopes tightly, intent on reaching our goal, working to implement the plan, to reach our dream— all this focus and dedication places huge blinders on us. We may be diligent, but we’re also dangerously myopic.

And it severely inhibits our relationship with life. We’re so intent on getting somewhere, or performing well, or becoming someone in particular, that we shut out and shut down. We silence the messages coming from our world. We don’t take in information, we just plow ahead with evermore determination.

Good-bye to curiosity, farewell to experimentation. Welcome in disappointment, failure, regret.

We could lighten up—we could go for direction, not destination. We could invite in what the world seems to want for us, what it’s offering us right here, right now.

We could enjoy what we’ll see and discover when we take off the blinders of non-negotiable destination.

Steadfastness

The basic difference between an ordinary person
and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything
as a challenge, while an ordinary person
takes everything as a blessing or as a curse.
Don Juan, Carlos Casteneda

Steadfastness is a lovely, old-fashioned word that we don’t hear much about these days. It describes how warriors stand their ground, how they find their position and stay there, unshaken and immovable. Steadfast people are firm in their resolve; they are not shaken by events or circumstances. They stand clear in their beliefs, grounded in their cause, faithful to the end.

Steadfast people seem very rare these days, a distinct minority in the flood of opportunistic, self-serving, priority-switching, disloyal people we encounter daily. And we may question our own steadfastness. But there are enough of us out there, people who place a value on steadfastness and want to learn how to develop it.

It’s fine for steadfast people to be the minority. The world always and only changes from the actions and commitment of “a small group of dedicated people,” as sociologist Margaret Mead stated so clearly years ago. Instead of being distracted by all the unsteadfast ones, we need to actively search for each other and expect we’ll find us.

Yet we will have to look in new places—among those we’ve discounted and misjudged, those who disappeared from our awareness months or years ago. We have to look again, and be willing to be surprised by who we see.

And once we find each other, we need to support and encourage our steadfast behaviors—the times when any one of us speaks up, stands our ground, sees clearly, refuses to yield, doesn’t give up.

Steadfastness is a capacity that gets easier as we’re together. The ground we stand on gets more firm and offers more support. It expands to uphold a surprising number of spiritual warriors.

Staying

The solution is never about fixing
but about staying...
with the fear of helplessness
and loss of control.
Ezra Bayda
Zen teacher

After we’ve tried and tried and only failed, we usually want to get out of there as fast as we can, find a new project, a new partner, a new place. Anything to forget our failure and frustration.

Of course, even as we scramble for a new chance to feel successful, we know there’s no escape, that we take ourselves with us wherever we go.

Yet how do we resist the compulsion to grasp after new things, to find security elsewhere—anything to get out of the mess we’re in?

All we have to do is acknowledge that we’re helpless, that things are not under our control. Simple.

Some describe this as surrender, or yielding, or giving in. These aren’t capacities we’ve thought of as strengths. But they keep us in the turbulence, they enable us to stay.

Ironically, we find the strength to stay by realizing that there’s nothing we can accomplish by staying.

And there we are, still in the middle of the river, hoping to be ready for what’s next.

Choosing

Every day I have to make
a choice not to give up.
Non-profit CEO

Perseverance is a choice. It’s not a simple, one-time choice, it’s a daily one. There’s never a final decision.

Our first “yes”—filled with energy and enthusiasm—brought us here, but it’s of no use as the waters rise and the turbulence increases. By the time we’re surrounded by obstacles and opposition, by aggression and mean-spiritedness, our initial choice has no meaning (if we can even remember that optimistic moment).

This is as it should be. Having to make a choice every day keeps us alert and present. Do I have the resources, internal and external, to keep going? Can I deal with what’s in front of me right now? Do I have any patience left? Is there a way through this mess?

These critical questions require a momentary pause, a little reflection. Rather than just striking out or being reactive to a bad day, we offer ourselves freedom. Do I continue or do I give up? Even a brief pause creates the space for freedom. We’re not trapped by circumstances or fatigue. We give ourselves a moment to look as clearly as we can at the current situation.

And then we make a conscious choice. Every day.