I didn’t specif­i­cally men­tion it last week, but the 2 sto­ries about Walk­ing the Ledge were orig­i­nally pub­lished in my first (out of print) book, “Sto­ries from the Sea of Life” (1994). The two sto­ries popped into my head last week, and I fished around on my hard dri­ves and located the Word file for the book, and grabbed the text.

And then, I thought to myself, “Self, I’m pretty sure not very many read­ers of the blog would have read that book, as it was pub­lished before I was online.” Which in turn led me to think that shar­ing some of the sto­ries over the next while, along with some fram­ing con­ver­sa­tion, might be both fun and informative.

My clients, in the last few weeks espe­cially, have been lost in the sea of “right and wrong.” Not specif­i­cally in a moral­is­tic way, but rather in a more global way.

1. What is the “right” (career study major, way to raise my kid, life direc­tion, etc.) for me?
2. What is the “right” way to deal with (par­ents, in-laws, “bosses,” spouses, etc.)

What’s fas­ci­nat­ing is how this turns out to be a game of sorts.

The game comes in 2 flavours.

1. end­less loop­ing through thoughts, try­ing to fig­ure out the out­come, i.e. not being will­ing to act until one knows the action is the “right” one, and
2. end­less loop­ing through “jus­ti­fi­ca­tion” sto­ries, so as to prop up doing more of what isn’t working.

It’s not my fault–I’m stuck here!

If you look at all of this by step­ping back a bit, what you soon dis­cover is that all of the above are actu­ally designed to do one thing—to main­tain the sta­tus quo, while caus­ing one to think that some­thing is being accom­plished by all of the men­tal gym­nas­tics. (I like to call this men­tal mastrubation…)

Now, it’s tra­di­tional for peo­ple to defend them­selves. They develop cer­tain ways of doing things and view­ing the world. Some of these ways get the result they are seek­ing, oth­ers emphat­i­cally do not. I like to remove the “work­ing” ones from the table (other than to use them as ref­er­ences, as what works in one area almost always can be adapted to work in another…)

Which leaves us with things that are not working.

One friend hates it when her mother “inter­feres” in her life. So, for the longest time she insisted that her mother stop inter­fer­ing in her life—that her mother change her behav­iour. You see where this is going. She objects to her mother’s attempts to con­trol her, so she com­bats this by try­ing to con­trol her mother!

I actu­ally had another client say, “I tell him again and again to stop repeat­ing himself…”

I’ve men­tioned in the past the Tao te Ching, the amaz­ing, cen­turies old Taoist guide­book. One of the key con­cepts is Tao­ism is Wei Wu Wei. “Wu may be trans­lated as not have or with­out; Wei may be trans­lated as do, act, serve as, gov­ern or effort. The lit­eral mean­ing of Wu Wei is “with­out action” and is often included in the para­dox wei wu wei: “action with­out action” or “effort­less doing”. [Wikipedia link]

The para­dox of act­ing with­out act­ing, or effort­less action, might bet­ter be thought of as “action in har­mony with the Tao.” And the Tao? This is the inde­scrib­able nature of the uni­verse. Thus, one acts in har­mony with “that which is.” As in, it’s much eas­ier to pad­dle with the current.

Now, when I pro­pose this, my clients are quick to point out that they don’t want to be a door­mat. They are not about to let any­one or any­thing get the bet­ter of them. So, for exam­ple, when some­one yells ant them, they yell back. Or they run home and hide. When I ask them how often such a ploy actu­ally resolves any­thing, they say, with a dis­mis­sive sigh, “Well, noth­ing changes (or it gets worse,) but at least I showed him (her)!”

Yikes.

Wei Wu Wei is not pas­siv­ity. It is enlight­ened action. It is doing some­thing, see­ing if one is closer to the goal, and cor­rect­ing accord­ingly. With­out judge­ment, with­out try­ing to force the uni­verse to change. Effort­less action.

The odd thing is that, in many areas of our life we, we have learned this les­son. Peo­ple who play musi­cal instru­ments, for exam­ple, “get into the music.” Their lit­tle fin­gers fairly fly across the keys or frets or what­ever. If you ask them to think about and ana­lyze their fin­ger move­ments, all hell breaks out. It’s effort­less, until you put your mind to it…

Or, for all of you who are mobile, go to the top of a flight of stairs and walk down. Stop about 5 stairs from the bot­tom, hold on to the rail, and really think about step­ping down one step. Think about your bal­ance, your foot place­ment. See what happens.

Dar­bella and I com­mu­ni­cate, I think, really well. We use a con­sis­tent model, and use self-responsible lan­guage darn close to 100% of the time (and we catch our­selves quickly when we mis-speak.)

It seems effort­less, and it is. It just wasn’t when we started.

I espe­cially wanted to defend myself, and to blame Dar. Dar has been amaz­ing at stay­ing calm and invit­ing me to get over myself. Ini­tially, I’d offend myself over what I thought was her crit­i­cism. Then, I’d have a breath, and in the space, I could see that I was wind­ing myself up, and that wasn’t resolv­ing the issue. It was sim­ply feed­ing my self-righteousness (which def­i­nitely needs to be toned down…)

Dar, on the other hand, tended to clam up, hop­ing the con­ver­sa­tion would go away. She learned, with prac­tice, to state her needs and inten­tions clearly and directly.

So, yes, it was hard, damn hard, until it wasn’t.

But the key, as I end­lessly repeat, was starting.

Most folk are just plain lazy. If a thing requires pain and effort, well, that just must be the “wrong” thing to do. Yet, change always requires both pain and effort. The ego cre­ates the pain, and break­ing a habit requires effort.

So, we sug­gest just starting.

Do things dif­fer­ently, pick a direc­tion (a com­mu­ni­ca­tion model, a way of being, a course, a career) and just start. Sign up, sign on, move your lips the way the model directs. What­ever. It’s not going to get eas­ier of you think about it more. Some­times you just have to dig in, start climb­ing, and see what happens.

Which leads to this week’s clos­ing story:

Just get on with it!

Climb, Baby, Climb

My wife Dar­lene and I love hik­ing. As a mat­ter of fact, back when we were dat­ing, a hike was our first vaca­tion activ­ity. We decided to hike South from the North­ern end of the Bruce Trail, a sys­tem of trails that runs through Ontario. The North­ern end is rugged and treach­er­ous; with warn­ing signs posted and every­thing. We’re both expe­ri­enced back-packers and we sur­vived with noth­ing more seri­ous than a dam­aged toenail.

On day three of the expe­di­tion, we came across a hole in the ground. The handy, dandy Bruce Trail Guide­book told us that one could climb into the hole, climb down a wall and emerge on a path that led to a secluded beach. We dumped off our packs and looked into the hole. Blackness.

We had no flash­light along. I started wor­ry­ing about a descent into the dark­ness. I whipped open my pack, and stated to haul out all kinds of climb­ing gear — ropes, anchors, stuff. I decided to lower the packs down first, then find an anchor point and lower myself down on a rope belay.

Actu­ally, I was afraid. I’ll climb any­thing … so long as I can see where I’m going … so long as I can think about it for a while. My back was to the hole, my head buried in my pack, my mind rac­ing, try­ing to find a good rea­son … excuse … to use to let Dar know that I thought that we shouldn’t climb down. Maybe later, or tomor­row … or in a cou­ple of years.

In the midst of my reverie, I heard a voice from afar off. I got up, looked around, and noticed that Dar was miss­ing. I looked down the hole. She was 30 feet below me, and the small amount of light down there was glis­ten­ing off of her smile. She said, “What’s tak­ing you so long?” 

That was the moment I decided I’d be with Dar for the rest of my life. I quickly climbed down. I also did an incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult climb back up, but that’s another story. 

Life is about get­ting on with what needs to be done. There are a mil­lion and one rea­sons for not start­ing, for turn­ing back, for stay­ing put, for being “safe.” At the end of the day, how­ever, noth­ing will have changed. Far bet­ter to risk, to dare, to climb.