“The first thing to drop is the story ”

Let’s have a look at the rest of the “story”—
The Per­fect Day

As I wrote last week, the “Per­fect Day” exer­cise comes from a work­shop I used to run. Being a Zen guy, I’m fairly prac­ti­cal. I work from 2 sim­ple questions:

1. what am I actu­ally doing?
2. is it working?

I call these ques­tions the Util­ity Test.

Most of us crave complexity

I notice that I am in trou­ble when I make things com­pli­cated. The “com­plex­i­fy­ing” process is a way of delay­ing tak­ing action. Here’s a client story from the year I spent coun­selling stu­dents at the Uni­ver­sity of Guelph. A cou­ple of my clients were Post­grad­u­ate can­di­dates, and had either a The­sis or a Dis­ser­ta­tion to write. Since the two I’m think­ing about were both women, let me use “she” for the rest of the story.

My client was both sad and anx­ious. She told me that she was in the Sci­ences and had a The­sis due—that it looked like it was going to be 95 pages long. She had no clue how to write such a large and com­pli­cated paper.

I let her talk—about her research, about com­plex­ity, about how impos­si­ble it was to write a 95 page paper.

I agreed with her.

She looked shocked! “But… but… what can I do?”

I said, “You can’t write a paper. Here’s what you can do: Turn on your com­puter. Pull up Word. Type ‘Intro­duc­tion.’ Then, write the first word.”

Her prob­lem was that she was look­ing at this big, bad project, of infi­nite size (those of us in the Human­i­ties are crack­ing up right now, and think­ing “Only 95 pages? My intro­duc­tion was 95 pages!” But I digress.) and complexity.

Let’s go back to my two ‘util­ity questions’:

I’m busy… stay­ing stuck!

What was she actu­ally doing?

Answer: Mak­ing her life mis­er­able, while not writ­ing her paper.

Is it work­ing for her?

YES! but only if her goal is to make her­self mis­er­able while not writ­ing her paper.

NO! if her goal is to write the paper.

See? Sim­ple!

Look at your Per­fect Day story. Read it, and let your­self feel what it would be like to have this way of being, exactly as you wrote it. Check in with yourself.

Ask your­self, “If I had this, would I be content?”

Now, take a step back:

• If you have your Per­fect Day—if you are liv­ing it, good for you! In keep­ing with the above ques­tion, are you con­tent? Are you sim­ply liv­ing your days, or are you mak­ing things com­pli­cated for yourself?
• If you do not have your Per­fect Day (and I sus­pect this to be the case for most of you), what’s hold­ing you back?

Make a list of all the things that must be done before you can begin to live your Per­fect Day.

This is your “com­plex­i­fy­ing list.”

Now, let’s make a sig­nif­i­cant point here, ref­er­enc­ing back to my client.

Her com­plex­i­fy­ing list was a string of com­plaints, fears, and dra­mas. These were not items on a “To Do” list. These were inter­nal dra­mas with only one pur­pose: to get her to focus on them, instead of sit­ting down and writ­ing the paper.

In all cases, our egos are invested in keep­ing us stuck. We get to a cer­tain point—call it your comfort/discomfort point—and some aspect of your ego starts to toss up excuses not to move for­ward. So, “stuck” means “stuck in your present story.”

Well, at least my head isn’t really stuck!

Many are the clients who get right to the point of liv­ing their lives fully, pas­sion­ately, and with engage­ment. There’s this ‘hic­cup,’ as they con­front their feelings—a sense of new and uncharted, risky, chargy energy aris­ing. Poof! They either stop ther­apy, or go into ‘defend­ing mode,’ or they argue that things are “Alright the way they are.”

In a sense they are tying them­selves up in the knots of their fears, and not notic­ing the reper­cus­sions of being stuck. The under­ly­ing dis­sat­is­fac­tion hap­pens despite their suc­cess in other areas.

Drop­ping old ways of being, even painful ways, means risk­ing the unknown. Many would rather stay stuck in the familiar.

For my client to move through her stuck point, she had to

• first of all notice what she was doing,
• sec­ond, declare that it was not work­ing, and
• third, do what any­one who has writ­ten a major paper has done—she needed to write.

Here’s another ver­sion of stuck that may be familiar.

You have your act together in sev­eral areas of your life, and notice one of those dis­com­fort / stick­ing points in another area. Part of you knows you must ded­i­cate time and effort to push­ing through the block, yet you scare your­self into focussing your atten­tion on the stuff that is work­ing! You say, “See! I’m doing so well in all these areas!”

And the unre­solved stuff goes back­ground, there to fester.

The point of the Per­fect Day exer­cise, and the other 2 ques­tions, is to get you to look at, iden­tify, and con­front any­thing that fails the util­ity test. In other words,

1. here you are, right now, as you are. Accept that this is so—how you are is how you are, right now.
2. Admit to the ways you are block­ing your­self, and remind your­self of what you are aim­ing for.
3. Have a breath, and cre­ate a “To Do list.” Make get­ting to your Per­fect Day a list of do-able, sim­ple, ‘bite-sized’ tasks.

The paint­ing at the begin­ning of this arti­cle illus­trates a Zen story.

When asked, “What is enlight­en­ment?” the mas­ter put down the heavy bag he was carrying.

When asked, “And how does one then live an enlight­ened life?” he picked the bag back up, and con­tin­ued walking.

Put down the dra­mas, sto­ries, fears and eva­sions. Then, walk.

Next week, we’ll wrap this up with some sug­ges­tions about gen­tly hold­ing focus.