#126: Redrawing Our Relationship With Ourselves
Thank you for all the messages that I received after last week’s letter on gratitude. One of the messages I received was from Huda Booley, who told me that in the holy Quran, there’s a verse that translates as ‘if you are grateful, I will give you more’. I have been thinking about the power of that all week. Even the divine responds to gratitude. I hope that you all had an opportunity to tell someone in your life why you’re grateful to them. If you haven’t yet, do so. You will make the world a better place.
The one asset we all have is ourselves. Ironically, it can also be the asset that we value least. And so today, I thought we’d explore a few ways we might use ourselves more effectively. For, as author Sulaiman Addonia has written (in his beautiful and provocative essay The Art of Making Love to Yourself), “Redrawing our relationship with ourselves takes us a step closer to embracing a new way with others.”
/strategy
I am halfway through Mark Epstein’s The Zen of Therapy. Epstein is both a psychiatrist and a practising Buddhist. He wrote the book to explore how his Buddhism informed his psychiatric work.
He explains that to gather his material, “I challenged myself over the course of a single year to write down as accurately as I could recall, the details of at least one session every week (or every other week) when something interesting caught my eye, when I had the sense that the Buddhist element was in play.” It struck me that it was a great technique that could be used in many different situations.
He comments that “My choices were, on one level, arbitrary. I made no effort to chart the progress of any particular patient but focused on my own feelings of having contributed.”
And in this way, drawing on his experiences, Epstein developed the insights to write his book.
Imagine for a moment something about yourself that you want to understand better or improve. It could be as simple as wanting to improve your communication in meetings. Pay attention to all the times when the room really seems to be listening to you. Afterwards, take some time to reflect on and write down what was going on at that moment. You will improve your understanding. You’ll build the insight needed for action.
You can choose any question you want to answer and then systematically observe yourself, and record and reflect on your learnings. You will be richer for having done so. You will have the material to write the book of your life.
/self
Unfortunately, we can get often stuck in stories about ourselves that are unhelpful. Sometimes those stories might tell us that we’re worthless, or that life is not worth living. They might be more subtle, telling you that you can’t or shouldn’t do something, but still limiting the life you could be living.
One way to use the asset of ourselves is to ‘change the stories we live by’.
Timothy Wilson’s Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By is packed with examples of how reframing our stories can unlock new possibilities. The research tells us that leading a happy life requires that our lives are imbued with meaning, hope and purpose.
You might find yourself in a place where everything feels difficult or you’re doubting whether your actions are worth the effort. Give Wilson’s ‘Best Possible Self’ exercise a try.
For four consecutive nights, find a quiet place and “Think about your life in the future. Imagine that everything has gone as well as it possibly could. You have worked hard and succeeded at accomplishing all your life goals. Think of this as the realization of all of your life’s dreams. Now write about what you’ve imagined.”
He tells us to not only envisage what we’ve achieved but also to detail the actions we took to get there. In that way, you’re already starting to shape your action plan. This exercise can add meaning and purpose.
However, you might be struggling with hope. You might have had a series of bad setbacks. You might be constantly ruminating, your mind a swirl of negative thoughts. Wilson tells us that the best way of dealing with such events is to first, get some distance from it so that thinking about it doesn’t overwhelm you and then to analyze why the event happened. Importantly you want to focus on the underlying causes. A critical component of our wellbeing is being able to understand what has happened to us and why, this exercise helps with that.
So, “the next time you think about an upsetting event from your past, remember to take a step back and analyze it from a distance, and to think dispassionately about why it had occurred. In short, don’t recount the event, take a step back and reconstrue and explain it.”
/soul
I’ve struggled to write this week’s letter. Strangely its theme was already set last week and then life happened. I was no longer sure whether it was useful or appropriate.
Multiple times I contemplated just sending you a note to tell you that I wouldn’t be writing to you this week. In other moments I thought that I should tell what I am about to tell, and yet that too didn’t feel right. Then, I thought I would just send the letter as if nothing had happened and that felt worst of all because life has happened, and that life is behind the words that I write to you each week. I felt that if I didn’t share this with you that I would be dishonouring our conversation.
On Monday night, my phone rang. It was a call that I had been anticipating for some months. I answered and heard what I knew I would hear; that our beloved friend was no longer with us.
Our friend was a beautiful soul. He was a collector and connector of people. Seated at his dining table, you might find yourself between a police general and a reverend, opposite a professor or two, or perhaps a young exchange student. His collections were diverse. He connected people from multiple places in the world, enriching all our lives.
He could be wickedly naughty and mischievous. An old school friend recounted that his only interest in rugby was ‘who is that cute one?’
All who knew him spoke of his intelligence, his curiosity, his generosity, and his sensitivity. Another friend reflected that he saw the injustice in the world and felt it acutely, in part because it had shaped his life and also because he cared so deeply about those around him. He carried the scars of a hard world on his heart and soul.
And, in recent years, he lost connection with all the wonder that he was. He lost sight of his magnificence. There were periods when he would reconnect with hope. He was blessed with cherubic cheeks and in those brief months of belief, they would return, erasing the haunted hollows that had appeared. I would smile and gently pat his face. He would proudly tell me of kilograms gained. He was an amazing cook, and for all his naughtiness and irreverence, was quite particular. Every meal had to have three courses; anything less offended his sense of decorum.
But these were temporary respites, and no reminding or remonstrating from friends and family could keep him close to his light. The darkness returned, and in the darkness, he tried to numb the pain, steadily fading from himself and us. His niece reflected that in the last months he often sat quietly, absorbing the world, saying little. He was always a good listener, but he wasn’t one who sat back. He had views. Strong views. Well-informed, principled views and he expressed them. Powerfully. But he became quiet.
And now, well now, he has left us. And so, I wasn’t sure how I would write today, but now I have.
As I fell asleep on Thursday night, I momentarily thought that the hardship of life is that we accumulate losses as it unfolds. And simultaneously, unbidden, was another thought, that the joy of life is that we also accumulate beautiful memories.
It took me to V.S. Naipaul’s comment, “We are never finished with grief. It is part of the fabric of living. It is always waiting to happen. Love makes memories and life precious; the grief that comes to us is proportionate to that love and is inescapable.”
Take a moment to remind yourself of how precious you are.
Much love
Karl