Say What?

At my favorite coffee shop (which will go unnamed because they ain't paid for the ad but it rhymes with charbucks) there is this BIG poster for one of the things they offer: "STUFFED PRETZEL WITH SODA." And I have asked the obvious: however did they get the soda in there? My suggestions were not appreciated for some reason; but after all, don;t they want to communicate?
In a time which takes great pride in the various forms of communication (telephone, television, texting, podcasting and, yes, internet to name a few) why have we become so sloppy at basic communication skills? Often when couples come to me for help, one of the central issues is communication; they cannot talk to one another without a shouting match if not long periods of silence. And this type of noncommunication does not take into consideration the non-verbal forms of connecting with one another (fill in your own ideas here.)
Granted, verbal communication is over-rated. As that Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn once said, "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on." Many people think that if they simply say something, promise anything, that will solve everything. True, nothing will actually change, but, gee, didn't they say they would get around to doing something? But the non-verbal may be no better. Many couples become sexually intimate before they really know each other.  And, despite what movies seem to imply, relationships are not cured of all problems by a passionate kiss. Too often I have seen couples where the sex has become blase, and they look beyond that and realize that, out of bed, they don't really like each other.
Communication is a multi-step process that begins with learning to listen and continues on to making sure the other has heard what was, in fact, said. It involves accepting the other person even when the two of you disagree. It means that talking louder will not guarantee that what you are saying will be heard (Exhibit A: "I've told you kids a million times..." at the top of your voice.) It means setting aside a time and place where you are not likely to be interrupted or distracted and talking with one another on the issue at hand (and only that issue!) until some sort of resolution has been reached (even if it is little more than the choice not to try to change each other any more in this area.)
Communication can take many forms. And there are just as many signals that communication is not happening. Lack of coherent response. Over-reaction. Sudden change of subject. Garbage-dumping (which consists of sudden venting of all the things that annoyed, disturbed or confused back thru the eons of time.) No response at all. And it can be tricky to identify that breakdown in dialog.
This does not mean total surrender on communication, nor taking pride when a relationship persists in spite of this major lacunae. People need to keep trying. One of the major accomplishments in life is knowing that others hear what you are saying, and respond.

Multiple Choice

Even before I met with the search committee, one of the members warned me, "He only wants yes or no answers." They had met with another candidate who kept qualifying or explaining, and that was not acceptable to this one committee member. Sure enough, very early on in the interview, he faced me with questions that he obviously saw as yes-or-no questions.
"Do you believe in God?"
"Do you believe in Jesus Christ?"
"Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?"
Looking back now, I can understand his stance; he had neither the sophistication nor the expertise to enter into some kind of theological debate parsing the finer points of theosophy. Explaining would not clarify; it would confuse. I said yes to each question, then added to the other committee members, "I could explain what I mean by each of these if you want."
It was many years ago that happened (and yes, they did call me as pastor.) Since then, I have dealt with others who sought such yes-or-no answers, who approached life at the most basic levels and rejected any attempt to suggest that there might be more than that. As a therapist, I meet people who come with issues that, however complex, they expect solutions right away, solutions which require little effort and less thought.
The difficulty is, of course, that many questions have more than one answer (if they have an answer at all.) Human beings are wonderfully complex, and we seek to fit others into our procrustean bed at our peril. There have been many instances when the choices of boxes to be checked didn't match with the reality of a particular person. The most vivid example, of course, was apartheid, where even a drop of blood from an African background meant consignment to abasement. And we Americans struggle with the heritage of a president that doesn't fit into our limited options.
But there are less obvious instances: sexual orientation, spiritual commitment, ethnic heritage. Despite our attempts to cling to stereotypes, many people from such groups just will not fit into our expectations. (What does an Arab look like? A homosexual? A person from this or that religious group?) And in a world that is constantly in motion, it is doubtful that things will become fixed any time soon.
This does not mean that nothing can be sure in our world Each of us can know and celebrate who we are. But we must hold back from pigeon-holing others based on our own need to know.

Community

One of the (many) human tensions is between individual autonomy and community, between being a separate person responsible for oneself and being part of something larger. We waver back and forth between the John Wayne who was the lone cowboy out in the Old West and the John Wayne who joined with others to fight for what was right. Taken too far in one direction, we hold back from any relationship and view the world with suspicion; in the other direction, we are mindless cogs in the great machine. Some would view both these options with disdain. As Groucho Marx once said, "I don't want to join any group that would have someone like me as a member."
Of course, the dichotomy (like all such) is false; we are part of a community even while we celebrate our individuality. Even the iconoclast has an ideal to follow. Even the atheist has something to believe in. Even the skeptic must accept a place on which to stand.
Yes, I belong to a community. It is located in Scotland, and was started by a Church of Scotland minister named George MacLeod in 1938. It is known as the Iona Community, describing itself as a "dispersed Christian ecumenical community working for peace and justice, rebuilding of community and the renewal of worship." The first time I set foot on that tiny island off the west coast of Scotland, I knew it as my spiritual home.
Of course, it could be that the current resistance to community is because we have such difficulty dealing with balancing different ways of looking at the world. We'd rather go our own way (and expect everyone else to go our way as well) than deal with different points of view. Or we'd rather fall into the lockstep approach to community that asks nothing more of us than following the herd. (Of course, those adamant individualists among us can be just as conformist in their own ways. Are you listening, Ayn Rand?)
This is not a plea to join this or that group, nor an apologia for the life of a hermit. It is a recognition that we need to balance these diverse aspects of life. It is not easy, sometimes feeling like going down a rapids with one foot each in two separate canoes. And in a world that has become more and more intolerant of ambivalence, we will face a great deal of hostility.

Live the Questions

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once advised a young would-be poet:
     "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant dqay into the answers."
We today, in our persistent insecurity, want answers, and we want them now! We do not want to hear that some questions have no answers, at least not now. So we are ready to accept any answer, regardless of accuracy, truth or common sense. Conspiracy theories are just as common as ever, but now they are being brought into the mainstream. (Over 50 percent of all Republicans believe President Obama was not born in this country.)
Some of this intolerance of the uncertain is human nature; we will put up with much, but we have difficulty accepting not knowing. And where we do not or cannot know, we grab anything which seems acceptable to our own experience/predisposition. Have a problem understanding this or that social issue? Cut the Gordian knot by explaining that it is all a massive conspiracy that keeps people in the dark. That way, we do not have to face our own limitations, or the fact that we do not have all the facts.
To be sure, there are influential people/ institutions/ supposed sources of information (are you listening, Fox News?) that deliberately exacerbate people's fears to promote their own agenda. But such are not conspiracies. Some may be nothing more than incompetent. Some may be attempts to stand on the seashore and prevent the tide from coming in. And some, yes, are stirring the pot to confuse and dismay.
Does all this imply that there are no answers, or at least no obvious ones? That, alas, is the way many respond when their own easy answer of choice does not come up as the default setting of life. We want answers, and we want them now! Of course, there will be times when solutions are withheld by unforeseen and unnecessary obstacles. But a child does not become an adult with all of the abilities and wisdom of an adult just because that child wants it. The first shoot of a plant does not grow to its full height no matter how much we might wish it so.

Making Changes

A photo on line of one of the protesters at a recent (unnamed) political rally showed an over-weight, slovenly young man with a sign that was, frankly, scary. It read, "Oppose Change," only the C had been made over into a Hammer-and-Sickle symbol. He was giving  the camera a vacuous grin. I had two immediate reactions: (1)Here was someone who was facing inevitable disappointment, as change in some form or other is inevitable. (After all, wasn't it the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who observed that no one can put their foot into the same river twice?) (2) We as a society have taken a human tendency- resistance to change- and held it up as a virtue.
We as a species do not like change. I have often pointed out that we accept change only when the pain of changing becomes less than the pain of staying the way we are.  (Odiorne's Law- patent pending) But the reality is that change happens whether we like it or not. The decision we must make is whether the change will be what we want.If we assume a passive stance, we have no idea and  no say as to the result. As the Zen saying goes, if you don't decide where you want to go,you will up someplace else.
As I said, change happens- anyway! Even our faith gets involved. We might talk of worshiping a God Who is the same, yesterday, tomorrow and always. But this is also a God Who constantly makes all things new. Each dawn brings a new day, completely distinct from the others before or those to come.
Of course, some deliberate changes end up the wrong ones anyway. We make choices that we wish we had not. There are no guarantees.But that does not get us off the hook We still must deal with the changes.That's what's called living.

Never Face the Facts

That's what the sign says, hanging in my office: NEVER FACE THE FACTS. This is not meant as an affirmation of massive denial. Rather, it is an attempt to point people in the right direction.
We have a social obsession with making sure that our own point of view is supported by scientific, objective reality. I recently overheard a person who was telling everyone about some convoluted bizarre conspiracy theory (did you know that the 9/11 tragedies were caused by a secret U.S. government plot? neither did I) that this off-the-wall idea had been tested by several scientific groups. Now that I think of it, he didn't say what the results of those tests were...
The only real fact is that we have a hard time determining what the facts are. Back in 1997, Elizabeth Loftus and her students carried out more than 200 experiments to discover the etiology and prevalence of false memories, how they resemble real memories, and how to tell the difference. In these experiments, false memories were created in participants, using a variety of conditions. The result was called "imagination inflation." In another instance, two psychologists were able to so confuse participants they actually signed confessions for damage to a computer that never happened.
But even more than the inevitable subjectivity we face, there is the issue that we use "facts" as a way to avoid dealing with feelings. If we can distract the discussion to determining exactly who, where, when and how, we don't have to confront our feelings about the what. And sometimes these debates about factual details become talking more and more about less and less, whittling nothing down to a fine point.
But sometimes we need to give up this quest for factual certainty. Sure, if we are working in the sphere of law, which must decide by its very nature what is real and what is unreal, or if we are building a building and must dwell in the very embodiment of the material, it would be confusing at best to derogate factual details. The fact is, we live in a world that is factually slippery. Ask any police officer, and you will learn the unreliability of eyewitnesses.
Does that mean that we must resign ourselves to a world without certainty? It sounds like a nightmare, where nothing is solid. The point, however, is not to consign ourselves to trying to catch a black cat in a dark room (and not knowing for sure there is a cat there to begin with.) The point is to recognize the importance of our inner reality as much as the world around us. The spiritual, emotional, psychological reality is not bound by facts, but it has just as much importance.

Winning

Never mind what that possibly (probably?) disturbed television star may say, "winning" is not worthwhile. Regardless of what he may mean by that, which seems to have something to do with unrestrained self-gratification and attention, we have fallen into a mistaken notion that, as the sports media would tell us, winning isn't everything- it's the only thing!
We have confused capitalism with competition, and assumed that material accumulation equals self- worth. One misguided state representative in my ancestral state even went so far as to advocate that the weak, the physically or mentally disabled, the less-than-perfect, should be shoved off to our very own gulag. Regardless of how we heed our faith's dictums on caring for those in need, the urge of our society to turn our backs on those who do not have it as good as some is greater than ever before in the wake of an economy that has left more and more in need and  fewer and fewer with the willingness to help.
So what do I say to the low-income client in my office who is in anguish over the possibility (probability?) that her state aid might be cut, leaving her without a place to live? Or to the client who can only get the mental/physical help necessary through Medicaid or Medicare? Especially when others seem all too ready to shrug their shoulders and walk away, consoled with the rationale that government has saved a few dollars to spend on its most recent war?