Tuesday, November 06, 2007

You There with the Speakerphone!

I am reading the Harry Potter books, with pleasure. They are not great literature, but they are crammed with lovely imaginative touches.

Before I start the next one, I’m reading, also with pleasure, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, Elizabeth Gilbert’s account of her year spent in restorative travel after a horrible divorce. She wanted to rediscover joy, and did.

Lisa M. recommended the above and also Byron Katie’s Loving What Is. It didn’t sound appealing, but it’s actually very good. She says that emotional distress is caused by thoughts that conflict with reality, and that when we go up against reality, we will lose, but “only every time.”

She prescribes writing down our grievances and asking the following questions in regard to each sentence we have written:

Is it true?

Can I absolutely know that it’s true?

How do I react when I think that thought?

Who would I be without the thought?

For instance, “Such-and-such person is wrecking my life with her selfish behavior.” Is this true? No, not literally. How do I react when I think this thought? I feel angry, I think of awful things to say, I spend a lot of time brooding about it, I feel tense and upset. Who would I be if I suddenly lost the ability to have this thought? I would be peaceful and calm.

A thought like “This person should not be doing X” is false because the person is doing X, even if it is true that I think she shouldn’t be. My misery comes entirely from my thought, contrary to reality, that she shouldn’t be.

“We should not be at war in Iraq.” Indeed we should not. But the truth is that we are, and my effectiveness at whatever pro-peace activities I undertake will not be greater if I am enraged or depressed that things are as they are. I will more effective if I can calmly say, “This is how things are. What can I do that will be helpful?”

Byron Katie thinks everything falls into one of three categories: My business, someone else’s business, and God’s business, though the term “God” need not be used. This is tricky. I tend to regard 95 percent of everything as my business, and I feel the remaining five percent is someone else’s business, and he or she should do something about it, pronto.

The first of the Twelve Steps concerns this: I am powerless over such-and-such. It is out of my control. However, I feel that if I can talk someone else into doing what I want, then it wasn’t out of my control. If I can argue or bully someone else into making things the way I want them to be, then it wasn’t exactly out of my control, was it?

The other day, my coworker said, “I’m trying to think of a way to communicate something tactfully.”

I said, “You’ve come to the wrong place, but tell me anyway.”

She said one of her team members is spelling their new boss’s name wrong in emails, and she couldn’t think of a way to let him know without making him feel criticized.

I am a person who thinks nothing of instructing a complete stranger to stop using her speakerphone (because she should not make so much racket at work), so the idea of hesitating to tell a coworker a simple thing that would spare future embarrassment is incomprehensible. I swear, I had to refrain from walking over and telling the person myself that he’s spelling his boss’s name wrong, even though it’s not my boss!

It made me think I might be worse off than I thought, though I do draw the line at using a weapon: Anything that can’t be achieved without a gun I do consider to be beyond my control.

Needless to say, this approach brings a certain amount of misery, so I think Byron Katie is onto something, ditto the Twelve Steps (for 68 years now), plus my mother has been onto it my entire life: “Don’t worry about it, and don’t nag [whoever the current nagee is]. You’re just going to make him/her unhappy.”

For that matter, I suppose every great world religion covers the same territory, not to mention Abraham Lincoln: “A man is about as happy as he makes up his mind to be.”

But Byron Katie makes it very simple, with this little process that makes it clear how one is creating one’s own misery, so go ahead and read it.

You can follow the four questions with a “turnaround”: “He should care more about my feelings” could become “I should care more about my feelings” (and so take better care of myself by not stewing so much) or “I should care more about his feelings”—after all, I have already put quite a bit of time into worrying about my own feelings.

Or even “He should not care more about my feelings.” Maybe whoever it is has already done everything a reasonable person would consider reasonable.

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