The 12 Carts of Costco

We all know all of the following, but life can get a little hectic this time of year, things can start to fall through the cracks in Santa's sleigh, so to speak. So let's have a quick review:

1) No one else can give you exactly what you want without you having to say a thing. Other people are not mind readers.

2) You cannot give anyone else exactly what they want without them saying a thing. You are not a mind reader either.

3) If there's something you really want, and if you can afford it, then get it for yourself at some time other than Christmas. Take some of the performance pressure off your loved ones.

4) Surprises suck more often than they provide true delight.

5) What you really need will not be given to you by someone else. It will not come in a gift wrapped box.

6) What you really need will not come from another person, or from outside your being, at all. It's simply not possible.

7) Because what you really need is the experience of being alive, a deepening appreciation for the complexity and the mystery of life.

8) It's easier to experience being alive while playing dominoes than while opening presents.

9) Just because "everyone else" does something this time of year does not mean that you have to do it. Not all families are harmonious. Not all families are actually good for their family members.

10) So choose what works for you. You are not obligated to spend precious time off from work with people who treat you disrespectfully, whether they call themselves family or not.

11) We all get a little "dark" in this darkest time of the year. That's one of the reasons there's been a holiday at the end of what we now call December since before you could call us human beings: to lighten things up, to remind ourselves that warmth will return, that spring will come again. So it's perfectly OK if you don't feel as cheerful as all those singers on the radio sound. They were paid to sound that way, you know.

12) Cook. Eat. Walk. Repeat every few hours.

What Story Are You Telling?

I was lucky enough to attend a lecture (on Friday) and then a workshop (on Saturday) given by James Hollis. And if you've never heard of James Hollis, then get on powells.com or amazon.com after you read this, look up his books (he's written 13) and buy at least 2 of them. Hollis is one of the great hearts and great minds of our time.

His topic this weekend was the stories we live and tell in life. That, unbeknownst to us, we're born into our parents' story, our culture's story, a particular time in his-tory, a particular location on the planet. And that, also usually unbeknownst to us, our own story develops out of these stories as we move through life.

As children, we had to fit into our parents' stories. We were totally dependent on them. As young adults, we had to fit into our culture's story. We had to make a living, support an emerging family, function in the society into which we were born. 

But at mid-life, our task begins to change. It then becomes our job to examine these stories. To see where they limit us, where they keep us from becoming who we alone were meant to be. Or, to quote Hollis, at mid-life it becomes our job to find out "What are the invisible agencies keeping me from doing what I need to do?" "What assignments were you given at birth? Which ones do you want to stop carrying out now? What secrets were you supposed to keep for your family?"


One of the problems with family dynamics is that the most damaged member typically sets the pathology everyone else in the family has to adjust to. Without knowing it, we let our parents' stories and our culture's stories become the stories of our own life. Another problem with family dynamics is that family members typically expect other family members do things for them that they ought to be doing for themselves. 


What psychologists call a "complex" is simply a stimulus activating your own personal history. When this sort of thing happened to you as a child, you acted in this way. The complex was an emotional adaptation that served you as a child, but when carried over into adulthood unexamined, will keep you from fully growing up. "Children are necessarily disempowered. Therefore childhood adaptations tend to disempower us as adults." 


We can't keep complexes from occurring. They're autonomous emotional systems which develop in every human being as defenses against the 2 primal human fears: being abandoned and being overwhelmed. But here's some pithy advice from Hollis on dealing with complexes as we examine our life stories:

"Try and build a lull between stimulus and response." 

"Don't trust your first responses. They are often in service to old complexes."

"Don't judge the feelings that come up in you. They're not 'wrong,' and they no doubt worked at one point in your life. They were logical reactions to the stories you lived in as a child. But become aware of what you're feeling, now that you're mature enough to change your responses."


Ask yourself: "What am I doing? And what is it in service to?"


As he says, our task in the second half of life is "to find out what is truly worth serving; to find out what we are called to do."

--notes on lecture by James Hollis on "The Stories We Tell," given in Portland, OR, 12-4-10.