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It Is The Turning Point
“Change today?” the beggar asked.
There was a touch of anger. Some sarcasm. A bit of sadness too.
My son glanced up at me sideways. “So now you want to be a father?” I’d been endeavoring to share some hard-earned, had-fought, hard-edged wisdom. The conversation had been difficult. The topic unpopular. The message unwelcome.
A long silence.
“Now you want to be a father?” he asked again. (Indeed, I haven’t always been the best dad I could be.)
“Yes, now,” I said. “I get to change and grow too, you know.”
That’s the beautiful part: we do.
We’re not caught. We don’t have to stay the same, be the same, do the same things, go the same places, have the same job, get stuck in the same relationships, be the same weight, have the same level of fitness, make the same amount of money, have the same outlook on our life. We can mix it up, turn it upside down, play it sideways. All out. Or not at all.
We get to choose. We get to change.
It is easy to feel stuck, to get stuck. All of us have been there. We get overwhelmed by the circumstances of our lives: by the financial pressures we feel, by the demands of our jobs, by the expectations of our clients and customers, by our responsibilities to our children and significant others and loved ones. We travel down long rabbit holes into careers that we are good at but that are unfulfilling, that fail to nurture and satisfy us at the deepest levels. We find ourselves in relationships that once fed us but now, perhaps only through the ebb of time, slowly poison. We wake up overweight and out of shape with cholesterol that’s too high and estrogen that’s too low and blood pressure that’s elevated and a sex drive that’s not. It feels too complex to untangle the tangled web; too difficult to overcome the status quo. The maze is too complicated and the cheese is nowhere to be found.
Can we get out? How do we get out?
Ann describes her father’s later years: disillusioned, he moved away; caught in cycles of hopelessness and isolation, he self-medicated with alcohol; and died alone. He couldn’t believe that his world could be different.
The worlds we create can always be different.
We get to choose. We get to change.
Sometimes we need encouragement. Sometimes we need coaching or professional help. Sometimes we need patience. Sometimes we need a kick in the butt. But the door is always open. It is our birthright to continually transform our lives, ourselves.
We in the Northern climes celebrate the winter solstice this week. The shortest day and the longest night. Light will triumph over darkness once again.
The seasons change. And so do we.
Years ago, renowned saxophonist Paul Winter composed a haunting instrumental piece as a hallmark of his magnificent winter solstice celebration: The Turning Point Suite.
Each moment in our lives is an opportunity, a turning point. Sweet.
Change today? Yes, today.
See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.
— Isaiah 43:19
That Giant Flushing Sound
It’s December, and you’re being pulled into the vortex of time. The maelstrom is all around you! Can you feel it?
After Halloween, the year just seems to accelerate. After Thanksgiving, the days move forward at warp speed. The commitments and the demands and the lists and the expectations and the projects that need to be done – have to get done – before the end of the year seem to mount logarithmically. And then there are the card lists and the gift lists and the shopping and the school concerts and the holiday parties….
In many professions, there are the added pressures of pulling in the receivables and closing the deals by year’s end.
What to do?
Wrong question.
The question is what not to do.
The way out of the vortex – the only way – is the simplest and the hardest thing of all. The only way out is to say “no.”
Saying “no” is not news and it’s not rocket science. All of the leadership and success books will tell you that it is fundamental to your sanity and, paradoxically, a key to your productivity and goal achievement.
Jack Canfield in his book The Success Principles recommends creating a “stop-doing” or “don’t do” list. (My favorite list!)
I invited a colleague to a program I was hosting. Her response: “Thank you. But I ‘don’t do’ evening commitments.” (Those are pretty clear boundaries, I thought!)
But, why is saying “no” so hard?
Well, most of us are conditioned from very early on that “no” is not the “right” answer. As time goes on, you also begin to layer on your own assumptions – whether true or not – about what others expect of you.
Sometimes, I suspect, saying “yes” is just a habit. (I said yes to a commitment recently without even stopping to realize I would be out of the country during the time I’d committed!)
And yes, isn’t there a healthy dose of narcissistic self-importance that loves to believe that somehow your presence is essential or that you are the only one who can do something?
So as the vortex swirls, I’m working on saying “no” more often.
I’ve started by asking myself whether a project or an invitation is one that I “should” do or accept rather than one I “want” to do or accept. I’m working at eliminating the “shoulds.”
(Note to self: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.)
Saying no to the non-essential allows you to be more fully present in what is most important. By doing less, you can pay closer attention to what is essential. And as The Little Prince reminds us, “what is essential is invisible to the eye.” It takes time to see.
The Carmelite monk William McNamara writes, “We are not really practical, and we shall get nowhere, we shall never find life, life will escape us, unless we learn not to always be bustling about – unless we learn to be still, to let things happen around us, to wait, listen, receive, contemplate.”
“One final word on the subject of time,” McNamara says:
“I suggest that we stop doing half the work that presently consumes us. Then let us attend to the remaining half wholeheartedly, with contemplative vision and creative love. I stake the authenticity of our lives and the effectiveness of our work on this radical shift.”
I described the vortex to a colleague as a giant flushing toilet bowl.
Not a great place to end up.
Not Too Late
Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
No quote has troubled me more over the years than this one from Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Stars. Its clear message is that the passage of time eclipses the deepest yearnings of our hearts.
I think Saint-Exupery is wrong. I think we always yearn. I think our dreams always burn within us. The problem is that we don’t act.
My mentor, Galen Rowell, once wrote, “One of the most shocking realizations of adult life is that most of us are not fulfilling the closest-held dreams of our youth. Instead of pursuing dreams that were once integral parts of our personalities, we end up in one way or another fulfilling someone else’s idea about who and what we should be, usually at the expense of our creative urges.”
It is this realization that discourages, that breeds bitterness. It is this realization that dulls the spirit, that frustrates the soul.
But this realization that we are off course need not harden; it can be harnessed; it can propel us to fulfill what we know to be our heart’s deepest desire. With Wisdom, we can use it to drive us forward.
Time is a thief. But it need not steal those hopes and aspirations that form the core of who we were always meant to be. Our dreams define us. It is our essential Purpose to achieve them.
One of the most common themes I hear after talks I give on holding fast to dreams is this: I’m too old; it’s too late.
That’s bullshit.
Too Old, Too Late is a story told to mask fear, to hide insecurity, to explain resistance, and to excuse inaction.
History is replete with geniuses and giants in business, industry, art, entertainment, and athletics who were not “young” when they started out, whose talents and passions were ignited and came to fruition over the long arc of their lives. Here are but a few examples: Beverly Sills who eked out a singing career until age 40 when she became an operatic star; Colonel Sanders who founded Kentucky Fried Chicken in his 60s; Charles Darwin who toiled with his research and didn’t publish his first book on evolution until age 50; David Oreck who didn’t get started in his now world-famous business until he was 40; Grandma Moses who painted in her 70s; Julia Child who did not appear on television until she was 50; Rodney Dangerfield who only finally made it as a comic in his 40s; Bahadur Sherchan who holds the record as the oldest man to climb Mt. Everest at age 77; and Sister Madonna Budner who competed an Ironman triathlons at age 81.
There will always be other priorities, other responsibilities, and other things that “require” our attention. We are endlessly capable of explaining to ourselves why now is not the “right” time to listen to the still small voice that calls to us in the night, that echoes in the recesses of our hearts.
But what do we tell ourselves at the end of our lives?
How old will you be if you don’t start now?
Our resolves may flag. Our spirits may falter. But the clay of our lives does not harden. It is always ours to form.
Always.
Dreams deferred are dreams denied. Do what you’ve always dreamed of doing.
Do it now.
p.s. I help people at a crossroads figure out what’s next. Email me and we can connect for a call: walt@walthampton.com
A Disruptive Discovery
The most disruptive discovery of my adult life: not everyone thinks the way I do.
Not everyone wants what I want.
Not everyone sees the world the way I do.
With rare exception, though, everyone wants to love, and to be loved.
Everyone wants to feel safe and secure.
Everyone wants for a better world.
Just maybe not in the same way that you or I want it.
Which means that we must stay curious.
Especially now.
It’s easy to want to shut down. Turn your back. Lock your door.
It’s easy to want to rant and rage; and hurl insults.
It’s easy to want to condemn, and judge, and name-call.
It’s hard to stay curious.
Really hard.
But here’s the truth: In this last election, a lot of people disagreed with you.
And they are not all bad people.
Just like you, they cast their vote yearning for a better life for themselves and for those they care about.
Why? I don’t know.
But I want to.
The thing I loved most about law school was that we could disagree about fundamental principles and argue with one another all day long like cats and dogs. Then go out for pizza and beer; enjoy one another’s company and laugh; and then do it all again the next day.
We may have believed deeply that our classmates on the other side of the argument were wrong or misinformed or confused. But we never canceled them. We never called them names. We never concluded that they were fundamentally flawed as a people.
Their desire for a better world was my desire.
And we believed that together in our differences – because of our differences – we could make that happen.
I still believe that.
So become an investigator. Ask questions. Listen deeply.
Listen to their hopes and dreams.
Listen to their fears and their worries.
Listen to understand and not to argue.
Listen with the ear of your heart.
The second stanza of the prayer attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi begins: Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.
Love, friends. Just love.
That’s the only way to co-create that world we all long for.
What He Made Me Do
I hated him for it.
For what he made me do.
But it forever changed my life.
We worked together during one of the darkest periods of my life. My work was sucking my soul; my marriage was crumbling; and I was about to become a single dad to my three youngest kids.
I was angry, anxious, sad, depressed.
I needed a therapist.
I found Irv.
One of the most skilled I’d ever met.
Irv would move seamlessly through therapeutic frameworks: cognitive behavioral; psychodynamic; Gestalt. Humanistic therapies. Mindfulness based therapies. Even the Bob Newhart “Just Stop It” therapy.
Whatever worked, Irv used it.
As he was in the later years of his practice, the common framework of a 45 minute hour was a rather fluid one for Irv. Sometimes it might be 45 minutes. Sometimes two hours.
Whatever it took to get the job done.
I’d cry; and sob; and complain; and whine; and yell; and rant.
Irv would hold the space with such compassion and love.
And, as the energies would settle, there would always come that moment.
That moment when Irv would hand me the yellow legal pad and #2 pencil that he kept next to his wingback chair.
And ask me the question, “So what are you going to do now?”
“Write it down,” he’d say.
Because this therapy thing wasn’t about vast and half vast ideas; it wasn’t about bellowing into an empty echo chamber; it wasn’t about navel-gazing.
It wasn’t even about self-understanding per se.
It was about agency. Self-efficacy.
Creating a future. For myself, and for those I loved.
This moment in time that we’re experiencing together is especially challenging.
There’s a lot to cry and sob and complain about.
We need to whine and yell and rant.
To experience the anxiety and the fear and the sadness.
To feel all the feels.
And then…
To ask the question: What will I do now?
Because, there’s a lot to do right now.
Yes. It all feels daunting. Overwhelming even.
You may have no clue where to begin.
Begin wherever your heart draws you to begin.
That cause that you feel passionate about: climate change; immigration; systemic injustice; poverty; affordable housing; trans phobia; racism; food insecurity.
A letter to the editor; an article on Substack; a meeting; a rally; a political action group; an email to your congress person.
Become an activist. Volunteer at a shelter. Raise money.
“We can’t all do great things,” Mother Teresa once said. “But we can all do small things with great love.”
Because whether small or great, action is the antidote to despair and helplessness.
And the key to a brighter future.
Irv is long gone. But he still whispers in my ear.
As I do here in yours.
“So what will you do now?”
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