Unexpected sparks

Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought; our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks. -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

An unexpected spark brought gladness to me today. I was permitted an hour's reprieve from the corporate confinement I have voluntarily sentenced myself. My wife trekked from bucolic suburbia to the concrete maelstrom that is the business district (one of the many in Houston) where I work. I was able to introduce her to the pleasant, if soulless, coworkers of mine, and them to her. Then we had lunch.

She is such a delight, especially when she is freed from her domestic demands.

When I returned to my designated cell-cum-cubicle, I felt a bit lighter than I had before. Usually, when joy comes and departs from our lives, its brief appearance makes its absence all the more apparent, and the despair all the more palpable. Luckily, I am still under the illusion of bliss, and hopefully that remains.

Here's hoping that you have someone that can spark the kindling of your life.

(And, to continue the metaphor: keep the kindling of your life from getting soggy or else the spark won’t take.)

The Power Tools for Life (batteries not included)

So when we last left The Road Less Traveled, we saw that the difficulties in life are there to help us forge enlightenment in the kiln of suffering. Some might find this to be reassuring -- and indeed it is nice to know that there is a reason for what seems to be a series of arbitrary misfortunes -- but we’re also now wondering what we can do to develop ourselves in those times when we’re facing unemployment, a spouse that deserts us, or a really nasty papercut.

Peck tells us there are four tools at our disposal...

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Therefore let us inculcate in ourselves and in our children the means of achieving mental and spiritual health. By this I mean let us teach ourselves and our children the necessity for suffering and the value thereof, the need to face problems directly and to experience the pain involved. I have stated that discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life's problems. It will be come clear that these tools are techniques of suffering, means by which we experience the pain of problems in such a way as to work them through and solve them successfully, learning and growing in the process. When we teach ourselves and our children discipline, we are teaching them and ourselves how to suffer and also how to grow.

What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively that I call discipline? There are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing. As will be evident, these are... simple tools, and almost all children are adept in their use by the age of ten. Yet presidents and kings will often forget to use them, to their own downfall. The problem lies not in the complexity of these tools but in the will to use them. For they are tools with which pain is confronted rather than avoided, and if one seeks to avoid legitimate suffering, then one will avoid the use of these tools. Therefore, after analyzing each of these tools, we shall...examine the will to use them, which is love.

...So if your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution. First, you cannot achieve them without suffering, and second, insofar as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine. Then why desire to evolve at all, you may ask. If you ask this question, perhaps you do not know enough of joy...

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So, the four simple tools of discipline we can wield in order to glean worth from our travails are:

1. delaying of gratification – “Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live."

2. acceptance of responsibility – “The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.” Accept responsibility for your duties, successes, and failings. At the same time, distinguish between that for which you are actually responsible, and that for which others attempt to make you responsible. For instance, don’t let marketing specialists define your responsibilities in life.

3. dedication to truth – "What does a life of total dedication to the truth mean? It means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination...to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner." Oh, and by the way: "The less clearly we see the reality of the world--the more our minds are befuddled by falsehood, misperceptions and illusions--the less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and make wise decisions." Don’t be befuddled.

4. balancing – “To be organized and efficient, to live wisely, we must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future; yet to live joyously we must also possess the capacity, when it is not destructive, to live in the present and act spontaneously. In other words, discipline itself must be disciplined.” Some dead Greek guy (yes, it was you, Hesiod; now sit back down) once said “Observe due measure, moderation is best in all things.” Taken absolutely literally, this means one must not indulge in excess, but even moderation must be moderated, and this occasional excess encourages sanity.

Peck then follows this description of the tools of enlightenment with a discussion on the quality that defines how we apply these tools. He calls this quality “Love.”

Love (not romantic love, which is mostly a selfish emotion) is about nurturing your own or another's spiritual growth. Love is an action and a decision, not just a feeling, and it requires hard work and courage. “If an act is not one of work or courage, then it is not an act of love. There are no exceptions. The principal form that the work of love takes is attention. When we love another we give him or her our attention; we attend to that's person's growth. When we love ourselves we attend to our own growth." So love isn’t buying flowers, baubles, or toys for one’s mate, nor does it mean buying your child every toy he or she wants; it’s ensuring your loved ones take the path and have the experiences that will help them grow. And that means allowing that person some independence, and not suffocating him or her (and, in turn, yourself) with a constant, adoring presence.

The book concludes with a discussion on Grace, the least developed section of the book. There are interesting thoughts present here, but nothing new. Those who have a bent towards New Age religion might be sympathetic to the ideas present, but, while I’m squishy, I’m not that squishy. Nevertheless, I appreciate his attempt to herald the fact that there IS something grander and greater out there -- something bigger than each of us individually.

So, we know life is difficult, we know it's not by accident, we know the four tools that can extract benefit for difficulty, we realize that we need to apply these tools to our lives and the lives of our loved ones, and we have an inkling that there is something greater than humanity running the show -- now what?

Well, for one, it's probably time to read some more books. More immediately, it's time to quit reading this balderdash, stop delaying your gratification, and go out there and live.

And don't forget that floss and sunscreen can help prevent some of life's difficulties. Not all difficulties are good, I'd wager.

Why does your life suck? To make you better!

Life is difficult. With these three words, Dr. M. Scott Peck begins his book, The Road Less Traveled. I generally scoff at self-help books – and this book doesn’t entirely escape my pervasive cynicism, particularly when it lauds psychotherapy to excess – but I found this book to contain some intriguing insights that help put life in a new light.

Below are extracts from the opening pages of The Road Less Traveled. It provides Peck’s manifesto on life and what we need to do in order to makes something of our lives. First, we need to understand that difficulties are what develop us. Second, we need to cultivate discipline, particularly self-discipline to draw benefit from the obstacles thrown at us.

Here is Peck...

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Life is difficult...

Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been specially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others. I know about this moaning because I have done my share.

Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?

Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life's problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With total discipline we can solve all problems.

What makes life difficult is that the process of confronting and solving problems is a painful one....Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning...As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those things that hurt, instruct.” It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.

Most of us are not so wise. Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree attempt to avoid problems. We procrastinate, hoping that they will go away. We ignore them, forget them, pretend they do not exist. We even take drugs to assist us in ignoring them, so that by deadening ourselves to the pain we can forget the problems that cause the pain....

This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness. Since most of us have this tendency to a greater or lesser degree, most of us are mentally ill to a greater or lesser degree, lacking complete mental health. Some of us will go to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid our problems and the suffering they cause, proceeding far afield from all that is clearly good and sensible in order to try to find an easy way out, building the most elaborate fantasies in which to live, sometimes to the total exclusion of reality. In the succinctly elegant words of Carl Jung, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”

But the substitute itself ultimately becomes more painful than the legitimate suffering it was designed to avoid....And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.

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So, there you have it: the goal for each of us is to develop ourselves into spiritually mature beings before we die, but we’re faced with human characteristics that keep us from achieving this. The sins we face aren’t anything that haven’t been named before. They include laziness; lack of discipline; avoidance of responsibility; emotional immaturity; confusion over the true nature of love; poor parenting; and a culture that generally accepts and nurtures the victimization mentality. None of this is novel to us, heck we could write a book on them…only so many other people already have, so don’t bother.

Is this completely new to you? Probably not. Still, Peck has managed to distill the thoughts and ideas of others to a somewhat succinct description of not only the travails of life, but the reason for those travails: to forge your soul/mind/spirit/self into something greater than it was when it first arrived as a naked and goopy hominid.

For an even more succinct look at how struggles are the key to our advancement, there’s this anecdote about the girl and the butterfly:

A young girl noticed a cocoon with a small hole in it. The cocoon was wiggling, so she sat and watched it. After a while, to her delight, she saw a butterfly struggling to squeeze through that little hole. The butterfly worked and worked for hours trying to get out until it was too tired to try any more. The sympathetic girl thought she’d be a friend and help the butterfly out, so she cut away the rest of the cocoon. The butterfly was bloated with shriveled wings. She watched the butterfly for a long time, waiting for its wings to straighten so it could fly away -- but it never did. The rest of the butterfly’s life was spent crawling around the garden, lugging its fat body along and dragging its useless wings.

The butterfly’s struggle through the restricted egress of the cocoon is designed to force fluid from the butterfly’s body and into its wings. Without this struggle, it cannot fly or thrive, and it is forced into despair and a life of writing bad poetry in blogs until its existence is blissfully terminated, either by a bird fortunate enough to find the lumbering prey, or perhaps by just fading away after a meaningless existence in corporate America.

Peck doesn’t relate this fable, which probably would detract from the intellectual image he’d want to convey with his work, but it would have been more enjoyable to read this than the Tales of Psychotherapy he decides to share later in his book. Nevertheless, Peck does make a good case for the benefits of strife...a benefit that one can even accept regardless of religious preference.

Knowing all of this can make one feel better about life and the sucker punches it occasionally throws, but how does this help in dealing with the sucker punches? It doesn't, at least not too much -- but later in the book Peck describes the tools for turning your troubles into food for development. I’ll address these later. Until then, revel in your troubles. Or do what I do and sigh about them.

Wash under your nails...

The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly. –Charles Reznikoff, poet (1894-1976)