March Forth 2025: Raising a Parting Glass

This March 4, with a heavy heart, I share that I am retiring as a U.S. diplomat.  I joined the Foreign Service shortly after September 11, 2001, as the daughter, sister, and granddaughter of members of the U.S. military and as a profoundly patriotic American.  Earlier in my life, as a student of American history, politics, and law, I developed something akin to reverence for the genius of our government’s checks and balances, for our many rights and privileges, for our difficult and ongoing struggle to form a more perfect union where all are equal, for the rule of law that we painstakingly developed over centuries, and for our openness, generosity of spirit, and diversity.  I recognize I have enjoyed these benefits merely because of the accident of my birth here.  Thus, I was profoundly proud to be a part of a Foreign Service eager to share our values and urge stability through the rules-based order we sought to create out of the ashes of World War II and to help those most in need through our humanitarian assistance.  I feel blessed to have had a career that - most days - made me bound out of bed with commitment and purpose.

This fall, I will join the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the Knott Distinguished Professor of Practice in Peace, War, and Defense.  I am grateful to return to a place where I feel most rooted and to be inspired by the next generation who will carry forward our fight for a better world.  

March Forth with No FOPO

Artist: Paige Bradley

March Forth with No FOPO

First, I must confess I used the catchy FOPO to get you here.  It’s not mine.  It’s Dr. Michael Gervais’s “first rule of mastery,” and he uses it in his "high-performance" consulting work.  FOPO is “fear of people’s opinions” and pairs nicely with FOMO, "fear of missing out," which came to us with social media and other people’s perfectly-curated lives.

 

Alas, however, what I would like to share this March Forth cannot be summed up in a gimmicky way.  I have been thinking and reading about it for several years, and it grew out what can only be described as “my dark night of the soul” -- that profoundly impactful inflection point in one’s life in which everything falls apart and after which nothing will be the same.  So, now that I have you, please stay with me.  

 

In the rearview mirror now, as much as any set of traumatic experiences can reside there, the facts surrounding my dark night of the soul seem rather unexceptional. I was dealing with something deeply wrong and unfair at work (never fear, it was resolved favorably, but it felt interminable), I was worried about our country which was vibrating with angry polarization, I was evaluating myself, my relationships, my long-held beliefs, and I was suffering with the heavy weight of uncertainty from which I could not extricate myself no matter what I tried (for reasons internal and external to me). In the middle of this midlife set of crises, I also found I was dealing with unresolved and re-triggered pain from the past.

 

I suppose my dark night wasn’t unusual. So many people go through similar dark nights with similar themes. But I admit those years made me feel terribly alone and chock full of self-doubt.  The image I had in my mind was that my life had been this neatly constructed village of toy blocks, and then a huge earthquake-tsunami came along and devasted the village. The blocks, in my mind's eye, were now chaotically strewn about the floor and some had gone missing. I sat quietly and overwhelmed, on the floor beside the scattered blocks, trying to figure out how to rebuild as the ground still trembled with aftershocks.

 

Then, the problem became that I found myself doing what I always do – asking everyone else how to rebuild.  What should I want?  What I should do?  And once I had done this standard survey of what everyone else wanted (often guessing or assuming without actually knowing), then I set about figuring out how to contort and bend myself to be most satisfying to as many people as possible. I was sort of the Jeremy Bentham of people-pleasing.

 

During my dark night, I worked with an exceptional and patient coach. She showed me a diagram in our early work that I recall finding unremarkable as I jotted it down in my notebook.  She called it “Go Direct”:

 

The idea is that we waste an enormous amount of energy in determining how we feel about ourselves and our work by seeking the approval of others.  We climb the mountain of the triangle, constantly scanning the room for reactions, adjusting who we are or how we present ourselves to achieve more approval, and, in its more malign forms, manipulating or attempting to control narratives and other people’s perceptions. It lacks authenticity. It’s exhausting. It places us in the position of attempting to control what we cannot control (other people’s perceptions).  And it keeps us focused on outward indicia of performance and acceptance rather than our internal purpose and values.

 

Make no mistake – this phenomenon of approval-seeking is biologically driven. On the savannah, if we were cast out of the tribe, we were defenseless. Rejection was death. It is also psychologically driven. We are social creatures who derive great meaning and even survival from our relationships. Studies have shown that infants enter the world keeping a close eye on the facial expressions of their mothers, and they become deeply agitated when the mothers show no warmth or regard.

 

What is also remarkable is that we, as humans, despite this biological imperative to be able to read faces and rooms, are particularly bad at it.  We overestimate by dozens of percentage points how much people notice or register us thanks to an egocentric bias called the “spotlight effect” (it's true what my friend's mother used to say:  "ain't nobody studying you.") We also are remarkably bad at accurately discerning or guessing what someone else is thinking - even people with whom we share a close relationship.  It turns out, our own filters and fears are often the drivers of what we think another person is thinking instead of any form of accurate mind-reading.  If you doubt this, spend a day guessing what other people are thinking about you and then ask them.

 

Using her triangle, my coach explained to me that if we can “go direct,” along with base of the triangle, from what our purpose and values are to how we evaluate our performance, we will not waste time trying to shape narratives or earn approval.  We will also not use the “bad data” of what we think other people are thinking to shape our behavior and will be far more inclined to ask questions rather than make assumptions.

 

I confess I found the original presentation of the Go Direct triangle unremarkable because I was a bit like David Foster Wallace’s two young fish who don’t know what water is. As Foster Wallace wisely notes “the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the hardest to see and talk about.”  My coach had to work for my a-ha moment. We did exercises, examinations, and internal family system work. 

In one helpful exercise, she asked me to imagine I was in my car in a parking lot, driving, and about to park in a space when I “hear a car honk.”  She asked me simply, "what is happening?"  "You mean who is honking?" I asked.  "Sure," she said.  "Well, I imagine I've done something inadvertently stupid and someone is angry and honking at me," I responded, self-deprecatingly, searching her face for a grin of approval (so much to unpack there, right?).  "What else could be the case?" she asked. Silence. "Are there any other narratives?  Anyone else who might be honking for other reasons?"  It took a while, but we developed a list of five other potential options and discussed the likelihood that those other options could be true. "For next week," she concluded, "let's consider your initial assumption and what that might mean about the filters with which you process neutral information."  Boof.

 

After many sessions and many more books, it slowly began to dawn on me how hypervigilant I am to other people’s opinions. The reasons are myriad and no doubt have much to do with my family of origin, the culture in which I grew up, my gender, and various other contributing factors.  It also dawned on me that so often I had become “stuck” in life – unable to make important decisions or take risks or do what I wanted to do – because I was desperate to please all the people.  It was a humbling and startling realization, to say the least.

 

Once I pulled back the curtain on how much I was driven by other people’s opinions, the consequence of the revelation was to understand that I did not have good tools to know what my own desires were.  My signal-to-noise ratio was quite low. I could not hear my own signal for all the noise. I was a nearly-50-year-old mother of two, and I did not know how to know what I wanted. I did not know how to reduce noise. I did not know how to power down my high-sensitivity, oscillating, motion-detecting radar busily collecting data on other people’s reactions. I did not know how to observe and trust the sensations of my body. Sure, I had a sense of my values, but I did not know how to be fully guided by them. I couldn’t “go direct.”

 

In fact, I had to physically go into my closet and shut the door to introduce myself to myself. I wish I were kidding. Anyone who has read Untamed will smile knowingly. I sat in the dark in my closet, cross-legged, with my eyes closed, trying to hear my faint voice. I tried to feel what “resonated” with me.  Outside the closet, I had to practice observing what my body was telling me in a given situation. I had to notice that, when my stomach was in knots or my palms were sweating when I was with someone or in a certain building, it was likely not a safe place for me to be. I stopped trying to override and ignore that bodily data. I also had to learn to catch myself when I was guessing what someone else wanted and trying to give it to them. I started asking more open-ended questions to initiate real exchanges.

 

This work will be my “practice,” no doubt, for the rest of my life. Some people practice yoga poses, and I will practice how to connect with my knowing. I imagine that, for all of us, when we make the shift from a performance-based life (guided by the question “how am I doing based on outside indicia of success”) to a purpose-driven life (“how do I minimize the delta between my values and the choices I make”), then life must become enormously easier and more peaceful.  Peaceful. That’s the word for it. I can see glimpses of the peace that must come from acting from inside out instead of the reverse.

 

Let me hasten to add, at this moment when our airwaves and social media feeds are filled with narcissists and the chronically self-obsessed, I do not mean to suggest that we act without concern or empathy for others or, indeed, without the wise counsel of others.  One of my core values is to treat people with dignity and kindness. What I have now learned though is that I can move out from that internal value into the world because I value grace and not because I want you to think I am graceful.  

 

Also, I maintain a core network of wise, gentle souls from whom I seek advice.  At this point in my life, however, I am drawn to the people who ask me questions to help us both better understand and then offer, without attachment, their reflections. I am far less drawn to the people who tell me what I should do based on what they “know” or need (these people usually do not know they are swimming in water either), especially when they do so without being asked. As well, we can care about what our loved ones and friends think of our actions, especially when we believe they have our best interests and growth at heart, without worrying about what people, whose motives are unclear, think or need.

 

These are subtle distinctions and balancing acts to consider as we march forth to a life with less FOPO. True mastery of purpose-driven living is the stuff is Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Maya Angelou. I am sure we can all think of a person in our lives who does not waste precious energy fretting about the shifting winds of other people's opinions and whose purpose shines from her as if it were light emerging from cracks in her chest.  At a minimum, I am enjoying those peaceful first glimpses of the third chapter of my life in which I am driven by what I value and what gives me joy and meaning. Following my true north. For now, you will find me in my closet, listening intently.

From a Mother to Her Son at the Launching

June 15, 2023

My amazing son,

 

In my mind’s eye, I can barely picture the woman who began this journal almost two decades ago.  I had started work at the Department of State, and your dad and I had married the year before in Oxford, excited to start a family as we both turned 30.  It was as if we wished for you and you arrived.  I found out I was pregnant after we had already planned a trip to Australia in October 2003 to attend a friend’s wedding in the wine country of the Barossa Valley (I did not anticipate having to avoid alcohol or fly 20 hours across the world newly pregnant).  You were a world traveler from your earliest days!

 

As you embark on this next chapter, with the newfound independence that will come with it, I wanted to share a few humble pieces of advice.  What I offer here, I earned one gray hair at a time.  It is the wisdom of trying and failing, of being disappointed but seeking resilience afterwards, and of loving imperfectly and learning from life’s heartbreaks in the many forms in which they come.  I offer this advice knowing that your journey will be different than my own.  And I offer it knowing that if someone had offered it to me at your age, I would not have known how to adapt or change.  But nonetheless, here it is with hope and love.

 

Change

 

At my high school graduation, I gave a speech that I am sure was full of trite expressions of the consequential moment it represented to me and my classmates.  My grandmother had just passed away, and I remember wondering if she could see me delivering that speech “from heaven.”  The only parts of the speech I recall are mentioning her death, quoting Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If,” and offering a bit of wisdom I could not possibly have understood at the time – that“the only thing we can rely on to remain constant in life is change.”

 

It's true.  When I was younger, I thought life was a linear progression.  A straight line up towards “success.”  It would be defined by all the standard markers along the way:  college graduation, grad school, a job I was proud of, a marriage, children, a home.  I thought as I ticked off all of those accomplishments, I would be headed towards “success.”  But now, in the middle of my life, I see that life is full of surprises – both good and bad.  It is not at all linear.  There are ups and downs, joys and sorrows. There are crushing disappointments and unfair things.  Beautiful things too.  

 

There is no moment at which we obtain “success.”  Indeed, the only way to true success is to develop the skill to live in the moment as it is happening.  Try not to worry about the future or regret some aspect of the past.  You do not have control over the future or the past.  You can only control how you experience and conduct yourself in the moment you are living.

 

Enjoy those moments – they are precious.  Every one of them.  Pause and look around you whenever you can.  Take in the sights, smell the smells, listen to birds and the ocean and happy chatter.  Do you remember when we worked on a project about Mary Oliver’s A Summer’s Day?  It ends with:  “Tell me, what is that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  

 

After you read it, you went for a walk in the woods along the bike trail you take to school.  You told me how – without your phone and your airpods – you saw things you had never seen before on the path.  Try to turn off your phone and pay attention whenever you can.  There is beauty and wonder all around you.  

 

Someday, you might find yourself sitting with your toddler when you’re tired and have some looming crisis at work.  You might find yourself wishing away the moment, hoping to get to the next one when things will be less stressful.  In that moment, pause.  Look at your adorable, frustrating, beautiful, willful toddler and pick him (or her!) up and snuggle him.  And remember, one day, you’ll be sitting down to write a letter tearfully nostalgic for that moment and wishing you had lingered longer in it.

Your Knowing

 

Of all the advice I have shared with you in my life, this is the advice I wish I had known and believed earlier.  I was an adult with a career and two children before I even saw glimpses of this truth.  And as I have settled uncomfortably into it, I have felt lighter, freer, at peace.

 

Inside of you is something I like to call your “knowing.”  I have often put my hand on my midsection when I talk about it and said something like “our knowing is where are hearts and our mind meet up in our tummy.”  That’s, at least, how it “feels” to me.  Your knowing is the voice inside you that tells you what your passions are.  That knows what is kind or good or true.  If your knowing were a compass, it would point true north.

 

Too often, the clear, strong voice of our knowing is drowned out in the noise and cacophony of life.  People will not hesitate to share with you what they think you should do.  I often marvel at how freely we humans give advice to others about how others should live their lives (when we are usually hopelessly ruining ours).  I also marvel at how much we humans want others around us to think about and see the world as we do.  If possible, avoid people with strong opinions about how you should live your life.  (In fact, if possible, avoid people with strong opinions).

 

Instead, practice listening to yourself.  Sometimes I have to find a quiet, hidden place to listen to myself.  For any problem you have, think through the pros and cons (Nana calls this the Ben Franklin balance sheet), anticipate the consequences of various courses of actions, and be thoughtful about the effects of your actions on others.  And then, sit quietly after having weighed those factors, and the way forward will come to you.  You’ll know.  You won’t need to find it somewhere else.  It will be right there – inside of you.

 

Do the things in life that make you feel passion.  Do what brings you joy or meaning.  I am not suggesting you shouldn’t seek advice from people you trust.  I have always found it useful to ask people who I know have my best interests at heart how they view a problem.  And I am certainly not saying that you should hedonistically do whatever feels right to you in the moment regardless of how it affects other people.  One of the things I love most about you is that you are thoughtful and kind.  I think there is enormous value in going through life being graceful and avoiding unnecessarily hurting others.

 

Instead, I am sharing that I spent much of my life, until very recently, scanning every room I was in to see what other people thought of what I was doing and saying.  I was hungry for other people’s approval (for myriad reasons) and I often twisted myself in knots trying to please everyone.  I often ended up displeasing more people by trying to please everyone.  I sometimes even twisted my own truths to please others.  You simply cannot please everyone.  And there will be people in your life who will want things because it is good for them, not because it is good for you.  

 

So, as much as you can, strike out on your own path instead of following a herd.  If you do something and it brings you joy, do it more often.  If something doesn’t feel good or hurts, that’s a sign – leave it.  For your career, pick something that will inspire you, that will make you want to get out of bed with a sense of purpose.  Don’t do it for money or prestige.  Do it because you find meaning in it.

 

You are an old soul.  Wise beyond your years.  Your knowing will always guide you to your true north.  Listen to it.

Love

 

Finally, a word on love.  About two years ago, I asked you about dating.  You shared that you had read a statistic that only 7% of high school romances result in marriage, which surprised you.  A source of "unnecessary heartbreak."  I hoped to convince you then, as I do now, that we humans tend to get better at love when we practice a bit.  I hope you won’t be afraid to date, to get your heart broken, to fail and try again, and to find meaning and joy in your relationships with others.

 

I say this because there is nothing better than love.  Love from your family, romantic love, love of a friend.  It is the most important thing in life and the one thing that makes life worth living. 

 

When I was in college, I read a passage by the philosopher Bertrand Russell entitled “What I Have Lived For.”  I was so enthralled with it I saved it and would quote from it from time to time.  Russell shared that he lived life for three passions, the first one of which was love:

 

“I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.”

 

I imagine in the first and last sentences, Russell was speaking of romantic love and surely it does bring poetic ecstasy -- although that seems a bit artificial and saccharine to me today.  What I notice now is that Russell leaves out the opposite face of love – that it can also bring sorrow or grief through loss.  

 

Loss through a death, a slow drifting apart, or an angry parting.  I lost my dad to a sudden heart attack in my 20s.  His death rocked me.  How could someone I loved be here one day and gone the next?  This duality of love – that it brings both “ecstasy” and pain – is why some people avoid it.  To protect their hearts from the pain of loss.  They may even enter into relationships but never open up or share what’s inside themselves with another.  They do not want to be vulnerable.  

 

C.S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves, wrote this about those people:  

 

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

 

Do not let a fear of being hurt prevent you from loving.  There is so much beauty and comfort in love.  We go out into the world stronger and truer when we know there are people who love us at home or in our hearts.  There is often something akin to relief in being understood and loved.  

 

So many times, I have shared a problem with a friend and have felt the peace that comes from seeking solace in someone who knows me.  Knows my intentions.  Knows my inclinations.  It’s a sort of a shorthand developed over years of love that allows one to start any conversation with an assumption of good will.

 

Adrienne Rich says:  “An honorable human relationship - that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" - is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.  It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.  It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity.  It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.” 

 

There are many important ideas here – love is not a feeling, it is a set of actions.  It is a process.  True love takes time to build.  And it should be built slowly, faithfully, carefully, and honestly.  Building love requires vulnerability.  Building it requires you to share yourself, even the parts you don’t like or want to change.  And building it makes you a better person – because someone who loves you will not let you live in self-delusion.  Someone who loves you will help you be a better you and will grow with you.

 

The Intersection of Change, Knowing, and Love

 

So here is where my three offerings come together.  The basis of any true loving relationship between two people is the courage to share our true selves, and in order to do that, we must first know ourselves.  Just like the Bard taught us:  “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou cannot then be false to any other.”  

 

Tell the people you love, with integrity, who you are and what you want.  Avoid attempting to “control narratives” so that you are always the good guy or the best.  Do not be afraid to let someone you love see you, warts and flaws and all.  We all have our weaknesses.  But the people who love you know your weaknesses and love you anyway.  So be honest with them, and in your sharing of your true self, you will have a partner in your continued growth.

 

The people who love you will be with you throughout all that inevitable change in life.  They will be with you when you’re soaring to celebrate you.  They will be there when you’re nose-diving to help soften the crash landing.  They will be there to tell you when you’re not being your best self – and that, my son, is an act of love and courage.  

When someone who loves you invests in you to help you see something about yourself that you’re not seeing, accept it with gratitude.  Sometimes, I have been dragged kicking and screaming into understanding something I didn’t want to know about myself by someone who loves me.  After I got over my righteous certainty, I felt gratitude that someone would go that hard way with me and take the time to make me a better me.  Listening to those who love you is not inconsistent with listening to your knowing.  Your knowing will tell you whether those people have your best interests at heart, whether the source of what they are sharing is love for you, and whether there is wisdom worth considering in what they are sharing.

 

One of my favorite books is The Prophet by Khalil Gibran.  In it, he writes about the relationship of a parent to a child:

 

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, 

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and 

He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

 

That is how I picture this moment:  your launching off into the world and my being so honored to have had the time with you to prepare you.  I know your arrow will go far.  Enjoy every minute of the journey and know how much I will always love you.  

March Forth With Less Ego

During the height of the COVID pandemic, while flipping through old copies of America’s Best Essays in search of light or meaning, I read the forward to the 2007 edition by David Foster Wallace.  The pandemic was a dark season in my life for many reasons, and in that space, David Foster Wallace’s words resonated: 

“Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting ... to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the 'moral clarity' of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of information and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time and to need help.  [To be a free, informed adult] requires not just the intelligence to discern one’s own error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on and out therefrom, bravely, toward the next revealed error.” 

The older I get the less I realize I know.  Acquiring the humility to understand not only that we know very little but that we have far less control over what happens to us comes through a painstakingly slow process.  When I think of what I know now (that I “know” very little), I must confess I shudder a bit at my own past “moral clarity of the immature.”  How many things I fancied I “knew.” How many filters I used that distorted what I saw. How many people I did not hear because I assumed things as I “listened.”

Being trained as a lawyer, I was and am open to the idea that there are myriad sides to any story or conflict.  I also have seen in courtrooms how flimsy “eyewitness” testimony is and how many different psychological factors go into what we perceive and remember.  Five witnesses to the same car accident, if taken to different rooms, will all remember something different.  The driver was distracted. The pedestrian darted out of nowhere. The traffic light was green. The extent to which we are not fully and accurately perceiving the world becomes increasingly evident any time different people describe the same event or conversation. 

As a diplomat, I learned and relearned how much our cultures affect how we perceive the same series of events.  Whether it is the directness or circularity with which we say things, the way we maintain or avoid eye contact, how and when we press someone to do something, or even whether we show someone the bottom of our shoes, the tiny corner of the world into which we are born colors everything.  

Thankfully, these experiences and professions left me quite open to what David Foster Wallace wrote. But it wasn’t until I stumbled across another quote, that led me to listen to countless podcasts and read books by its author, that I invested significant time in considering the “ego” and the role it plays in our sense of certainty and righteousness about what we “know.”  The quote was from Eckhart Tolle:  

“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness.” 

I had never read anything by Tolle when I came across the quote, and I found myself re-reading the sentence over and over.  Grace is my favorite word, and I wanted to understand how to be in a “state of grace, ease, and lightness.”  Everything around me felt ungraceful, difficult, heavy.  But I kept mulling the words “to offer no resistance to life.”  What did that mean?  We surrender to all that happens to us?  We give up? How do we do that and is that desirable?  I wrote the quote on a scrap of paper and put it on my refrigerator door.  

I then read two of Eckhart Tolle’s books The Power of Now and A New Earth.  He is a quiet German-American who, at 28, lying in bed in a fit of existential, suicidal panic thought “I cannot live with myself anymore.”  This triggered for him an epiphany about how much we are “with our own minds.”  How much we are consumed by our thoughts that look into the future with anxiety, into the past with regret.  If we were able to reduce our racing thoughts and focus on just the present moment, much suffering would disappear.  Of course, monks have spent decades perfecting the art of being present, and I doubt I will ever come close.

But what I found most interesting about Tolle’s writing is his emphasis on the “ego.”  To Tolle, our ego is essentially what we identify as.  Our form.  Mother, father, wife, student, doctor, drunk, loser, philanthropist, hero.  It’s the list of things we put in our social media description.  The things we would tell someone at a cocktail party.  We all have our narratives of who we are, and by adulthood, we can rattle off our roles and our “story” with ease.  And in all of that identifying, by necessity, we are also saying what we are not.  

Social media, in many ways, has reinforced our egos and our associations with roles and identities.  I recently spent a year at Georgetown and Carnegie reading and teaching about social media and disinformation.  At the heart of my quest was to understand why America felt so polarized.  Of course, much ink has been spilled about the algorithms of social media and how they amplify both all the things with which we already identify and then amplify the “shock value” of content about those things.  Over the past two decades, we have become increasingly rigid about who we are and rejectful of who we are not.  This phenomenon is not only happening between the separate poles of political spectra, but within each pole as well.  One of the most common verbs used at the moment to describe what is happening *within* similarly-minded groups is “cannibalize.”

We have also become quick to dispense with people.  Last year, a documentary, 15 Minutes of Shame, explored the ways both public personalities and private citizens must now navigate harassment and public shaming online.  Thankfully, the documentary does a good job of noting that some forms of public shaming have resulted in progress toward better outcomes.  But in painful detail, the documentary describes stories in which every day people were subjected to a weaponized form of shaming or false accusations that were intended to hurt or destroy – often without an understanding of even the basic facts.  People lost their jobs and had their lives destroyed by a 15-minute whipped up frenzy of unexamined outrage.  And then the outrage moved on to a new target.  

A few years back, a close friend told me about the author Jonathan Haidt. I have now come to believe that his book The Righteous Mind should be required reading for anyone living in the modern era.  He examines moral psychology and the spectra across which we make several kinds of moral judgments and explains why conservatives value the traditional and liberals value change.  The overarching message is that conservatives and liberals frequently come out differently on moral questions, but each gets there in a “rational” way.  And neither is “wrong.”  We have become so certain that the other “side” is “wrong” that we do not even have conversations with each other anymore.  We do not try to understand.  We label and move on.

Jonathan Haidt famously quoted Zen master, Sent-t’san, from 700 CE in a TED talk:  

“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be ‘for’ or ‘against.’  The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.”  

This is very much in keeping with the philosophy of Eckhart Tolle about the “ego.”  Tolle would say the more we identify with labels or roles, the more inclined we are to defend that role or mindset in a knee-jerk, unexamined way.  The most liberating thing we can do is to identify less with the avatars we create of who “we are” and simply be present in the moment, with an open heart and open mind, willing to listen and see others.

It's a bit hyperbolic, but I would submit there is no such thing as “good communication.”  Very rare is the conversation in which each party walks away with the same understanding.  I have come to believe that communication is instead a whittling away of misunderstanding.  Adrienne Rich, in her essay "On Women and Honor:  Some Notes on Lying," defines an “honorable human relationship” as “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”  As a society, we must get better at the long, sometimes terrifying process of listening to each other – of whittling away our misunderstandings.  Of restating and clarifying. Of repeating back. Of coming to conversations with an assumption of good will.

We all go around this earth asking “Do you see me?  Do you hear me?  Does what I offer matter?”  Many of our conflicts, since time immemorial, have arisen when the answer to those questions is a dismissive, self-righteous “no.”  So, this March Forth, I commit to trying to distance myself from my ego, from my avatar, from my righteous certainty of things I “know.”  I commit to listen and see more, and speak second, not first.  I commit to using less labels for myself or anyone else. Perhaps the only label that should matter is Open-Minded Human (the acronym is even onomatopoetic – oommhh).  For sure, we do not need to be so open-minded that our brains spill out.  We can still make moral decisions, improve other people’s lives, and do good things in the world.  But we can do all of those things with much more humility.

March Forth: Serenity and Spheres of Control

 

Sunday, March 4, 2018

March Forth: Serenity and Spheres of Control

This March Forth, I am focusing on the concept of Spheres of Control.  A "resilience trainer" at work recently explained it to me, and I was struck by how useful the concept is for our world right now.  Somedays it is hard to wake up and look at my phone.  There are troubling trends in all corners of the globe, and the world order the United States and its allies spent seven decades trying to put into place faces new and unprecedented challenges.  Misinformation, spread like wild fire, fills our inboxes and computer screens, and it is hard to know who and what to trust.  Xenophobia, populism, authoritarianism, and angry rhetoric are on the rise, and terrorism and violence leave us feeling hopeless and afraid.  With all of these challenges, it is hard to imagine that in the past 20 years, we have been enjoying one of the most peaceful periods in human history.

So, how do we cope with the constant barrage of bad news and troubling trends?  One way is to understand, through the concept of the spheres of control, what we can and cannot affect or change ourselves.  Highlighting one of my favorite observations that there is nothing new under the sun, the spheres of control are essentially a glorified explanation of the Serenity Prayer:  "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

 The Three Spheres of Control:

Outside Our Control:  We all experience in life things that are outside of our control -- things we cannot change.  The weather, disease, global trade volumes, or the past.  Despite our lack of control in this sphere, I would hazard to guess that most people spend most of their time worrying about these things.   I certainly do.  Especially the past.  Worrying about things in this sphere inevitably will lead to frustration or depression because we feel helpless and overwhelmed when we try to change them and fail.

Influence:  There's a smaller sphere though that includes the things we can influence, but not control.  For example, when I am talking abstractly about a leader, I like to use the pronoun "she" and speak about the leader as a woman.  I fancy that by doing so, I can influence others around me to think abstractly about women as leaders.  I cannot, however, influence the centuries of oppression women  have endured and still endure.  And I have very little to no control over the fact that of the almost 200 nations in the world, only 15 have women leaders and that in Forbes Top 500 companies, less than 25 have women CEOs.  I can only change the way I think about women leaders and hopefully contribute to the way those around me think about women leaders -- but that influence is a drop of water in a mighty ocean. 

In this category, I would add that many people try to change other people -- and other people's behavior is decidedly outside of our control.  As a good leader, you can influence people.  But as a good leader, it's important to remember that you cannot control others.  Ultimately, each person in your life or your team will chose her own path, and it is important to realize that all you can do as a leader is shine a light on the path you think best.  Some people will not follow.

Control:  The only thing you have any real control over is yourself.  You can be in charge of what you focus on, what you tell yourself, and how you behave.  This sphere is where the majority of your time, energy and effort should reside.  You cannot control whether others chose to be decent and kind on social media, for example, but you can control whether you are decent and kind.  You can't control whether you become ill, but you can control whether you exercise and eat right and contribute to your own personal well-being. 

This March forth, I want to focus more on this small, but mighty sphere of control.  More importantly though, I am committing to spend less time focusing on the things I cannot control.  For example, it is a good idea to limit how much negativity I allow into my mind (and I can do so by choosing what I watch and read).  I am not suggesting that we should block out hard or sad news -- information about other people's suffering.  I am saying we should focus on being one of and supporting the people who are trying to lessen that suffering or impact it in a positive way -- people who are trying to make the world a better, safer, more decent place. 

Misinformation and the Sphere of Control:  The age of social media has done as much or more to change the world as the printing press or the steam engine.  Now anyone can be a "journalist" and information can spread around the world rapidly and exponentially at a speed unimaginable just 20 years ago.  Unfortunately, that means that for the most part, a lie can circumnavigate the globe before the truth can get its pants on.  If you're anything like me, you wonder every day if you can trust what you're reading (and this is a far bigger problem in certain countries where freedom of speech is under greater assault).  We cannot control that many bad actors use misinformation as a form of "hybrid warfare" to manipulate people.  Indeed, if you recall Plato's allegory of the cave, you will remember that leaders have been using misinformation to manipulate publics for time immemorial. 

What can we control?  We can control how we consume information.  For example, we can chose to get our information from many different sources to ensure we are not relying on one entity to "feed us" the truth.  We can also investigate the things we read to make sure they are true -- this is especially important before we share information with others on social media.  In this way, we can at least not contribute to the spread of misinformation.  We can also work to influence others to be cautious in what they chose to believe and to ensure they are using reliable sources.  And we can all contribute to what I imagine will be a global effort in the years and decades ahead to "fix" what social media has challenged -- our access to credible information.  Democracies depend on reliable information -- indeed as the Washington Post reminds us "Democracy Dies in Darkness."  So like Plato, we should all summon up the energy to get up off the floor of the cave, stop watching the shadows others project, and walk out into the light.

We Are Still Mighty:  One last thought -- it's easy to misunderstand the spheres of control as an invitation to surrender.  We just have to "accept" all the bad things that happen in life and are helpless to control them or alleviate others' suffering.  But it is not that at all.  It is instead an invitation to a more peaceful heart.  You can control how you conduct yourself and you can try to influences others to do good -- and in this latter category, we can all think of people who changed the world by shining a bright light on a better path to follow.  While I will not give up the fight to be my best self and to try to influence others to do the same, this March Forth, I will work harder to focus my emotional energy on those two things and less on the things I have no power to change.  May God grant me serenity.

Marching Forth: On Being Lion-hearted

March Forth:  On Being Lion-Hearted

I have been thinking this March 4^th (2016) about the concept of being lion-hearted.  I’ve noticed in the past few years that there’s a genre of writing I can’t get enough of.  The writer has a messy, complicated life.  She is exquisitely honest about and troubled by the messiness and her contributions to it.  She feels overwhelmed.  Perhaps she has failed at something.  She is not who she wants to be.  She starts a journey to become a different, less messy, better person. 

 

The writers of this genre have what I call lion-heartedness – it is the integrity to acknowledge life’s sweep-the-knees pain and the courage to undertake the slow process of recovery.  Lion-hearted people understand that their recovery is ultimately their responsibility.

 

The writers in this genre are Cheryl Strayed in Wild.  Faulkner Fox in Dispatches from My Not-So-Perfect Life. Elizabeth Gilbert and Brené Brown. Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  I started my love affair with writers when I read Joan Didion’s “On Self-Respect” my senior year in high school during an AP English exam.  So enthralled was I with Didion’s raw truth, that I tore the essay from the exam booklet (this was before the internet) and have kept it with me ever since.  I re-read it in moments of personal failure. 

 

Essentially, Didion reminds us that self-respect cannot and should not derive from the “doubtful amulets” of “good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale.”  Instead people with self-respect “have the courage of their failures."  They “exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character … the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life.” 

 

I am often struck that some critics of these writers I adore find them “selfish” or “self-indulgent.”  These writers’ resolutions of their problems are trite, they say.  Too Hollywood.  Tied up and packaged with a pretty bow.  “I’m healed!”

 

I would submit that these women hardly present a neatly-packaged picture.  In an age when we post idyllic, rosy-cheeked pictures of perfect lives on social media, I love the raw candor with which these women say “my life is a disaster” or “I am not who I want it to be and here I am bawling on my bathroom floor making a puddle of tears and snot.” 

 

The sources of these women’s pain run the gamut.  Joan Didion wasn’t accepted into Phi Beta Kappa.  For Elizabeth Gilbert, it was wanting something grittier than a life in the suburbs married to a man with whom she could not connect.  For Cheryl Strayed, it was the death of her beloved mother, an abortion, and substance abuse.  Maya Angelou survived rape and racism.  While the problems vary, the humility of the admission -- “I want to be something different/more/better” or “I want to move past this pain” -- is the stuff of true grit. 

 

I have evolved into my love for these writers.  As a young person, I used to say my favorite book was “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin (the feminist heroine drowns herself at the end).  I also loved Virginia Woolf (the author drowns herself), and Sylvia Plath’s poetry (do you see a theme? – but an oven).  As a budding feminist myself, I was drawn to these women’s struggles with traditional gender roles and their desire for something different, against the odds.  But at that young age, it was still hard to imagine a less tragic, melodramatic end, especially one that involved the unglamorous slog of persistence and the courageous, growing self-worth I admire now.

 

It was after becoming a mother that I became enthralled with the writers who acknowledged the unfair or unfortunate forces working in the world and sought a way to nonetheless conquer them (or at least go Over, Under, Through! them as Tina Fey advises).  I wanted to read writers who struggled with these questions:  How do I survive grief or loss (it is as inevitable as, and the opposite face of, loving after all)?  What happens when I truly can’t “do it all”?  How do I rise when I fall? … because not getting up isn’t an option.

 

Right after my last March Forth post, I read the most powerful essay by Dear Sugar (my beloved Cheryl Strayed) called How You Get Unstuck.   It is at times bleak and sad.  In the essay, Strayed is responding to a letter from a woman who miscarried a baby girl and wants to know how to get “unstuck” – how to “fix” her grief.  Strayed acknowledged the woman’s suffering: “This is to be expected. It is as it should be. Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us.”  And then she said:

 

“This is how you get unstuck. You reach. Not so you can walk away from the daughter you loved, but so you can live the life that is yours—the one that includes the sad loss of your daughter, but is not arrested by it. The one that eventually leads you to a place in which you not only grieve her, but also feel lucky to have had the privilege of loving her. That place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.”

 

The passage took my breath away.  Grief is hard work.  Grief is putting one foot in front of the other.  Only you can heal yourself.  I was reminded of the jagged, trending line of recovery after my dad died that is still very much a work in progress 15 years later.

 

The essay went on to tell about Strayed’s work as a youth advocate for a group of at-risk girls in a middle school.  I recognized these girls.  I could have been one of them.  In my 13th year, my life could have gone in any number of directions.  I, like the girls in Strayed’s essay, was aching, lost, angry, uncertain of my worth.  Strayed worked with these girls (giving them a journal – which conjured images of my own tattered black journal full of earnest scribbles), but found that the world didn’t really care about their troubles.  It was a startling reality for Strayed, but one she said shouldn’t have shocked her.  So she shifted tack – she taught the girls that only they were responsible for their fates.  Only they could do the work of saving themselves:

 

“Nobody can intervene and make [it] right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends … can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real deal down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you.”

 

I went to hear Strayed speak a few months ago.  Despite having read this essay more than a dozen times, I was jolted to attention about half way through Q&A when Strayed gave a “tough love” response to a heart-broken woman with spikey-hair and a nose-ring.  “Life isn’t fair,” she said.  “Bad things happen.  People fail you.  Self-pity is a dead-end road.  Giving a bad person the power to keep you parked on Self-Pity cul-de-sac is a waste.  You have to find a way to throw it in reverse and leave that road behind.”  I cringed (I’m a Myers-Briggs feeler).  Poor woman with the nose-ring.  But Strayed spoke the truth.  The courageous truth.    

 

There is one thing this truth is not, and two things it is.  First, it is not a “go-it-alone” admonition.  It does not suggest that you have to grieve alone.  It doesn’t suggest that the loving souls in your life can’t help you.  I have an intrepid Team Jennifer.  I have a set of family and friends who provide constant, reassuring, unconditional love.  I could show up on any of their doorsteps with a metaphorical black eye and a suitcase, and they would let me stay with no questions until I was ready to talk.  There are also houses of worship and grief groups.  And trained professionals who’s job it is to help.  And all of those forces can support you as you’re building that bridge through your grief. 

 

But here are two things this tough love is – first, it’s a reminder that when you’re grieving or lost, you don’t always make the best choices about who and what to trust.  Often in pain or despair or exhaustion (or all of the above), we look for crutches that don’t help us heal.  Some people use alcohol.  Some people work too much.  Some people lock away their hearts in an “air-tight casket of selfishness” (as C.S. Lewis says).  Some people find the strength to search for help but instead find careless anti-heroes.  Haven’t we all been lost in a barren emotional desert only to be approached by a “knight-in-shining armor” (said knight comes in both genders)?  He’ll extend his hand and announce he’s come to save you.  Only he’ll ride you a few hundred miles deeper into the desert and knock you off the back of his trusty steed when he sees you’re wrinkling his hero costume (he’ll probably take your canteen too as payment for having “rescued” you).  When you’re grieving, you can’t tell who’s a real hero and who’s a scoundrel.  And you may look for short-cuts to “heal” that only make things worse.  None of those strategies ultimately works.  You have to own your pain, be honest with yourself and others about it, and do the tough work of healing it.  And sometimes that process can feel excruciating … until it’s not anymore.  Until one day, you feel good for more minutes than you feel bad.

 

Second, healing yourself is deeply empowering.  While you have the responsibility to get better, you also have the power.  From that struggle to heal, to recover, to change, to live a life different than the one you envisioned or wanted, you gain self-respect.  You are the person who recreated yourself after a painful loss.  You are the one who had the courage to change.  You are the one who made amends.  You are the one who got knocked down and got back up again.  You are the one who is still rising.  You.  You did that. 

 

And it was fierce and lion-hearted.