Decisions and Elephants

There are some decisions, even important ones, that are easy to make.   In fact, most of the decisions we make are so easy to make that we’re not even aware that we’re making them. Or if we are aware, the choice is so self-evident that we simply know what to do.

I remember reading once about a condition of the brain that rendered it almost impossible to make decisions. As I recall (or as it seems to make sense to me in this moment) the problem that caused this condition was about emotional processing rather than analytic reasoning. While many of us pride ourselves on being reasonable and thoughtful people, it turns out that our unconscious emotions and intuitions are mostly running the show. Our conscious reasoning most often arises after the decision is already made.

One alarming study demonstrated that the conscious intention to move arises a split second after the message to move has already gone to the muscles in question. My decision to get up from my chair is made by some part of me deeper than my conscious awareness. My decision to move comes after the decision itself is already set in motion.

Jonathan Haidt, in his illuminating book, The Righteous Mind, uses the metaphor of an elephant and its rider to describe the mind. The elephant is all the parts (most of them) of our thinking that we are not aware of. The rider, who is ostensibly in charge of the elephant, is our conscious thinking. The rider appears to have some limited power to make small choices about the direction of the elephant, but spends most of his time making up reasons that justify the decisions the elephant has already made. We do not live rational lives. Our lives are shaped and mostly run by our unconscious selective perceptions and unconscious biases. Yikes!

Haidt goes on to say that if you want to convince someone who disagrees with you on an important matter (like who should be our next President), talking to them about reasons and analysis will not be effective. He memorably says: If you want to change someone’s mind, you need to talk to their elephant. You need to speak at the visceral level to the emotions and assumptions that are often below the level of our awareness.

This brings me to considering the decisions that are hardest to make. These are forks in the road that are both important and, in some way, balanced. Not only are we conscious of having to make a decision, but after weighing the options, both possibilities seem to be equally valid. The potential choices all have their pluses and minuses.

Now, sometimes the best solution in this sticky place is neither A nor B, but rather J or K. We often reduce problems to binary choices when, usually there is a whole range of things we have not even considered. Reducing reality to A or B is one way we manage the infinite universe of possibility, but it is also a way we needlessly disturb ourselves and limit our thinking.

But sometimes, either you go or you don’t go. A yes or a no is required. Sometimes there are two choices and both of them feel bad. This is the classic lose/lose situation. Or this is how it appears to the little thinking self.

Adding to the emotional weight of these difficult choices is the perspective we were taught in school that there is one right choice. Most of us have the sense that we need to make the right decision—that there is a right decision. When it is a matter of some importance, a decision that will have repercussions going forward, we want to make sure we get it right.

In the face of all this pressure and the impossibility of making a truly reasonable decision, one wise teacher (Yogi Berra) gave this advice: When you come to a fork in the road, take it. And of course, this is what we all eventually do. After soul searching and considering (which is often important), we simply do something. and the wonderful thing is that whatever we do leads us into our life.

It turns out that there are many answers to the same question, many choices and options that keep appearing and disappearing. We take one step, either skillfully or not skillfully, then we take the next step. Ultimately, life is not simply a moral quandary. Our lives are a woven fabric of small and large choices that offer constant possibility and challenge. We do the best we can and learn as we go.

In the midst of it all, perhaps we can enjoy the view from the top of our elephants and learn a thing or two about working together with them and our own mysterious elephant hearts.

Cycles Within Cycles

The dark is firmly established here in the Temple garden just a month before the autumnal equinox. Nights are cool and lengthening. I wake in full darkness and am re-learning to reach for the light. This is the new normal and will be for the next six months—a lifetime. Each season playing its role in the cycles of the year. And through these cycles, life and death play out in multiple wave lengths.

Dogen said that life itself is flashing on and off 27,000 times a second. He anticipated, through his own careful observation, the theories of some modern physicists who speak of a vibratory universe created of strings of possibility. Substance and continuity are an illusion of consciousness superimposed on the dynamic soup of stuff. Real life cycles itself into existence and then tracelessly disappears at unknown speed.

Slowing down slightly, we can notice is moment after moment. Though we string moments of experience into compelling narratives of who we were, who we are and who we will be, each present moment is its own complete universe. I can’t vouch for Dogen’s 27,000 times per second, but I can vouch for some wholeness that appears in the moment of our conscious awareness. This wholeness includes, but is not limited by, the infinite stories we are telling ourselves and others. In each moment, the fullness of each life is the fullness of all life. Past and future are merely stories that we tell and are both fully included in the infinite time of here.

Then there is the story of the cycle of day after day. The darkness of night giving way to the full light of daily activity. We rouse ourselves early or late, move into our day reluctantly or excitedly, then fall back when the darkness comes again—lying ourselves down restfully or fitfully into the obscurity of night. Again and again we travel through these diurnal cycles of light and dark. The imprint of this earthly revolving rhythm is imprinted in every cell of our body. (Though sometimes needing to be assisted by our morning alarm.)

The daily cycle then appears in abstract circles of weeks and months—a purely human invention that appears to have no connection to the natural world. Why seven days? Why twelve months and not nine? Does February have to be shorter than July? Social custom and convention rule our experience till Friday really feels different from Sunday—just because we’ve decided to divide our lives for the convenience of commerce.

But the seasons—different in every part of the world—come to us viscerally in the varying length of light and dark, the temperature and weather patterns. And all the flora and fauna of each particular place live in and through these subtle patterns. The trees in the Temple garden express and embody the seasons of New England. Hot in the summer with sometimes drought but often rain. Cool in the fall and spring. Then the cold and dark of winter. The coming and going of sap up and down the trunk and the emergence of leaves and the falling of leaves. Continual motion. Continual expression of the annual cycles of season. Look closely at a tree and you’ll know the season.

Then the cycles of the lives of all the beings themselves. The mayflies that live for a day, the wine red hibiscus flowers that open for a few days, the zinnia plants for a season. Then us humans that live for some unspecified length of days, months, years and decades. All our lives with a beginning, middle, then some unspecified but definite end date. We can’t know exactly which part of the cycle we’re in, but those of us of a certain age do certainly know we’re not at the beginning or even the middle anymore.

No time this morning for the centennial oak trees or the forests that live and change for centuries. Then the ponds and streams and mountains and valleys, even planets and stars and galaxies – all appearing and disappearing in their own time.

Morning twilight has come in the time it took to write all this. The nasturtium flowers that last for three or four days and are delicious and lovely to eat in salads are doing their early morning wiggle dance in the soft breezes that float by. The mug that holds my now cold tea was made from mud and water but will be around, broken or whole, for centuries—available to archeologists long after all I see vanishes.

Cycles within cycles. Stories within stories. All resting easily in this moment as the day begins.

The Neutral Zone

In any transition there are three parts going on simultaneously. We’re most often conscious of the endings—the losses, and the new beginnings, however faint they are. We are less conscious of the third, and often predominant part of transitions—the part where we are lost and uncertain. Endings are often painful, beginnings are exciting, but it’s the disorientation—the not being able to find firm footing that can be most challenging.

William Bridges, in his wonderful book Managing Transitions that is now out in its 25^th anniversary edition, talks about these three stages. He is very clear that although change can happen quickly, transitions, the processing and living into the new circumstances of our lives, happens in stages and over time. These stages overlap and at any point in the process one can predominate.   When I first Transitions many years ago shortly after moving to Worcester and beginning a new job, I was most struck by Bridges naming the amorphous not-knowing aspect of transitions—what he calls the neutral zone.

The neutral zone is the place where we don’t know where we are or what direction we need to be moving in. We have trouble focusing and feel uninspired or depressed. We seem to be spinning our wheels. Endings are not complete and beginnings are not clear. In the changes that are happening we have lost the foundation we counted on and we can’t even discern what direction is forward and what is back.

I have often thought that the Tibetan Buddhists are pointing to the same mind-space with their image of the bardo—that realm where souls abide in between incarnations. The bardo is portrayed as a dangerous place because you have no human agency. You are adrift without the power to make choices. You are blown about by the winds of karma. You cannot cultivate intention or awakening in the bardo. It is a time of waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

Sound familiar? Almost like being in the middle of a pandemic and still not being sure if we are in the beginning, middle or even perhaps nearing the end of the outbreak. Were you planning to travel this fall? Go to a conference in the spring? Travel oversees next summer? Now we don’t know how to plan and can’t clearly imagine what our future will be like.

With schools beginning in just a week or two, it’s not even clear if our children will be in school or at home. And even if we think they are going to be in school, they may only be there a few days a week. And there’s no guarantee that once they go back there won’t be another spike of infections and they will be sent home. Again.

It’s hard to live in the neutral zone. Our planning minds like to create clear pictures of the future. Of course, we never really know what will happen from one day to the next, but when our mind has a fixed plan that is reasonably close to what seems to be happening, we are able to ignore our true ignorance and the ultimate unreliability of reality as we imagine it.

The pandemic is pressing us all. Our President is using this as a time to illustrate the power of positive thinking. His hope seems to be that if he draws out attention to the good things and gets everyone to try really hard, we can beat the virus without wearing these silly masks and taking collective action to limit our physical contact. If we wait long enough this strategy might work, but only after a level of suffering and death that is far beyond anything we have encountered to-date. Positive thinking and willpower are rather weak forces in the universe. They can be helpful, but only when practiced in the context of working with some large unfolding reality of experience.

In the neutral zone, patience is the deepest practice. Waiting. Keeping vigil. It can be helpful to know and name that this place of uncertainty and inaction is a necessary part of the process. Everything takes its own time and sometimes there is nothing to be done other than to take care of ourselves right where we are, to remember that we are together even in our separation and to know that even in the confusion and uncertainty of the moment, our true life is right here.

Balancing Risk and Care

This morning, a little after five, I sit in the full darkness. The glow of my screen illuminates my fingers’ peripatetic movement over the black keys of my laptop while cars on Pleasant Street already plow through the early morning, intent on delivering their unknown drivers to distant locations.

The quiet roads of the early pandemic are slowly returning toward normal volume. I suppose this is good, but already I miss the early days of silence when this terrible virus brought normal life as we knew it to a screeching stop. It was a little like a snow day when everything is gratefully suspended and we hunker down in our cozy homes and wait for the snow to melt. But this was different. We were fearful but most of us had hopes that in a few weeks or perhaps a month or two, we would resume normal life up right where we had left off.

It hasn’t worked out that way. Now six months in, we’ve been through one wave of sickness and death here in Massachusetts. My friend Barry Morgan died unseen and will never come back. Others are struggling with the after effects of this dangerous virus. Infection rates are now quite low but threatening to rise again as they have in so many other parts of the country. What will the second wave be like? A small, barely noticeable rise or another perilous spike of infections, hospitalizations and death? Now, credible people like our family doctor say that two years is reasonable estimate for when the virus will really be under control.

Meanwhile, we get on with our lives as the weird mix of normal and physically contracted that they are. Zoom seminars and retreats make learning and connecting possible beyond our wildest dreams. Want to go on a Zen retreat in Ireland but don’t have the money to fly over? No problem. Want to learn how to scream-sing like a rock star from one of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject in South America? No problem.

But if you want to visit your elderly parents or have your children return to the ordinary melee of school and friends that we assume is healthy for normal growth—then you’re in a quandary. We’re in a quandary. Our ongoing predicament requires us all to continue to practice precautions that still feel very un-normal.

We have some neighbors near our place in the country (a quiet street in a nearby section of Worcester) who seem to think the pandemic is over. A nice young couple, they have a continual parade of friends over for dinner and hanging out. No masks, no apparent distancing, no fear. Though we occasionally hear their voices and laughter while we practice our Zoom-Zen (our internet connection is better there than here at the Temple), that’s not our main concern—the spread of COVID is. Do they think they are immune? Have they carefully increased the bubble of their contacts through negotiation and planning? We don’t know, but we are careful not to get too close.

The behavioral decisions that balance safety and connection are exhausting to make. They are not individual decisions. It’s not just about how I feel, but about some considered estimation of how my actions will impact the people in my bubble and all the others around me.

My grandson is about to enter pre-school. My actions impact him and his safety as his impact me. The pre-school is taking reasonable crazy precautions and everything will be all outside for the first few months. But then what?

My elderly parents are at their summer home by a lake in Vermont and need a family member with them for safety. Is it safe for them for me to go up even if I get a COVID test prior to travel? Is it safe for me to come back to my ‘bubble’ even given their carefully planned rotating care-takers? How do we make such decisions that are so fraught with unknowable consequences?

It’s exhausting. Probably no easy way other than continued attention and conversation including as many dimensions as possible. Being up to date on recommended guidelines and local regulations. Reading the latest about how the virus is transmitted and what are best practices. Taking into account the emotional dimensions of these decisions and the different levels of risk tolerance that are comfortable to all of the people involved.

Then we make our best decision and onward in this ever-shifting new un-normal.

Morning Moon

Against the pale blue,
the moon’s remaining
sliver easily abides
before its appointed
vanishing into
the coming light.
Fired pink
by the rising sun,
clouds come too.
The slight moon
flickers and sooner
than planned disappears
from view. Even
this is precious.

Waiting for the Morning Glories

The morning glories are refusing to bloom again. Like most years, they have already grown lush and covered the pergola with their generous heart shaped leaves. And like most years, there is this long delay before the buds and flowers come. I’ve been waiting patiently, but yesterday while driving to my bi-weekly speed shopping in the early morning at Trader Joe’s with the other old folks, I saw two gardens with lushly blooming morning glories. Granted they were the dark purple variety, not my preferred Heavenly Blue, but still I was jealous.

You can’t start morning glories until the weather is settled in the spring. They don’t transplant well so the tough and tiny round seeds get planted directly into the soil, but not until the nights are consistently above 50 degrees. Where I live, this is sometime after the beginning of June—depending on how adventurous you are. If the weather is warm enough and you soak the seeds overnight before you plant them, they spout quickly and grow at an astonishing rate of up to several inches a day—eagerly climbing whatever string or vertical support is handy.

Every year, the morning glories reach the top of the pergola in three or four weeks. Then they continue to grow—twining around other tendrils at the top and sending other shoots to follow the first climbers. Now in mid-August, two and a half months later, the morning glories are a mass of foliage that looks wonderfully healthy and lush. But still not one flower or even a bud.

I’ve read that morning glories don’t flower if the soil is too rich. But I grow them in relatively small planters and don’t enrich the soil or give them supplemental feeding. In fact, the mass of foliage so far exceeds the amount of soil they grow in that in the hot weather I have had to soak the planters twice a day to keep the foliage from wilting.

With the cooler weather, I’m conscious of the limits of the season. Some plants do well until the full frost comes. But the morning glories die after the first night in the mid-forties. This could come as quickly as mid-September, though more likely a month after that. It’s a brief window.

Of course when the morning glories do start blooming, they will produce scores of blossoms daily—impossibly lovely and delicate swirls of powder blue—each one a miracle of craftsmanship and design. Each flower flourishing for one brief morning, then the thin tissue of blue collapses on itself and falls away. Only to be replace the next morning by other blossoms. It’s a lovely and extravagant display that delights me every year.

And every year I have to remember to appreciate my impatience as part of the fun of it all. Like a little child who wants to read the same book over and over even though he knows and because he knows the ending, I wait eager and excited as the pages turn and the days go by. The ten tiny morning glory seeds have directed the show quite well up to this point and I have to trust that again this year they will accomplish their miraculous destiny.

Time of Disconnection

It’s a lovely cool morning. Autumn is on its way. The intense heat of the summer has temporarily released us from its grip. I am relieved and slightly disoriented.

The neighborhood is quiet. No cars on Pleasant Street. The sound of the Temple garden waterfall floats over the always distant rumble of the highway several miles off. I know it’s quiet when I hear the highway—the pulsing artery of commerce that keeps our consumer culture in business.   Silence, as John Cage taught us, is just the space in which noise appears.

Or we could also say that there is no silence. Always some subtle sounds of the breath moving in and out, the heart beating. Once, in the hospital, they checked to see if my carotid artery was functioning properly. Putting a listening device on the side of my neck that recorded and amplified the sound, the technician and I heard the great pulsating rushing—the sound of the blood rushing from my heart up toward the tender regions of my brain. She was rather neutral about the whole affair, but I was greatly excited to hear the roaring streams alive in my body.

I had an uncomfortable day yesterday. In the morning, I wrote and wrote and nothing held together. One thing came after the other and I couldn’t find any pattern or shape that felt right. I would either lose the thread or would find myself working hard to write something that was of little interest to me.

Most of my day was like that—a feeling a subtle and pervasive sense of disconnection. Even watering the plants and wandering in the garden didn’t help. The roots of my self felt parched and unable to connect to any nourishment. Still alive but held in solitary confinement by invisible forces. There were no walls or bars. The door was not locked. But I could neither find it nor open it.

Some states of mind are difficult to see clearly. Sometimes the light of awareness is diffuse and unable to focus. Like a day on the coast of Maine where the morning fog refuses to lift and one has no choice about clarity of vision. Of course, the trick is always to appreciate where we are, but sometimes this appreciation is nowhere to be found. I did my best to settle in to the place I was, but it was not comfortable. I really don’t like this particular feeling of powerlessness and disconnection. In the end, I just lived with it.

Patience is one of the qualities of mind that Buddhist call the Paramitas – the Perfections. These qualities are both the path to awakening and the result of awakening. (The traditional six Mahayana Paramitas are: generosity, discipline, patience, energy, absorption and wisdom.) Yesterday, having tried everything else, I opted for practicing patience.

Sometimes there is nothing that can be done. We can either rest where we are or we can keep trying to be somewhere else. Or, more accurately, we try some alternating combination of the two. I recommend doing something if you can and not doing something if you can’t.

Eventually—and sometimes eventually feels like a long, long time—things change. Difficult states ease and new possibilities emerge. The glue of things begins to hold again and the water somehow reaches my parched roots. Metaphors are plentiful and I once again begin using them indiscriminately.

For this, I am grateful.

Powerful Questions

I wake up amid the usual swirl of thoughts and wonderings. Lying in bed, I scan the contents of my mind to see what was alive. What territory am I in this morning? Everything is gray and fuzzy. I wonder what I will write about? Nothing especially calls to me.   But regardless I circle my wrists and wave my arms in the dark as if I were trying to stir up the stagnant energy pressing down on my chest. With an internal sigh, I get out of bed, pee, put on some clothes and head for the porch.

Even though I have been writing and posting almost daily for five months, I still don’t know how I do it. I am grateful for this. If it was up to me, if I had to figure out what to write about each morning, I’d be in trouble. I suppose it’s a little like walking, if you had to ‘know’ how to walk, you wouldn’t be able to take a step.

The part I appear to be responsible for is to getting out of bed, sitting down with my laptop and starting. Just get one sentence written, then see where it goes. I’m reminded of an exercise I used to do when I taught life coaching. It was an exercise about curiosity and powerful questions.

Curiosity is one of the primary skills for coaches like me. Rather than trying to fix things or give good advice, the skill is to be curious about what is going on. (This is actually much more fun than trying to fix people.) So we’d talk about curiosity—what it is and how it functions. Often participants would bring up words like wonder, appreciation and not-knowing. The image of young children often surfaced as well. I often mentioned that Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot, a former professor of education at Harvard once wrote that curiosity is one of the most sincere forms of respect. Rather than assuming that I know who you are and what you mean, I get curious.

In the workshops, we would then talk about different kinds of questions. There are informational questions, leading questions, rhetorical questions, ‘look at me’ questions and many more. There are also powerful questions. Powerful questions are short, open-ended and evocative. They invite the person you are asking into some deeper place.

We would explore powerful questions by me making a statement and them asking me several powerful questions related to what I just said. I would answer one of the questions, then pause to let them come up with more powerful questions, then answer that…and etc.

I might say: I have a practice of writing every morning.

Then someone would say: Why do you write every morning? And I would explain that why is rarely a helpful word because it takes people up into their head and invites a certain defensiveness. A more invitational way to ask this question is: What leads you to write every morning?   Someone would say How long have you been doing this? and I would say That’s an informational question. A more powerful question might be What led you to start this practice? Then other questions would come: What have you learned from your practice of writing? What is it like when you are writing?

And I might choose to answer the last question and say: It’s early morning, before the day starts. It’s quiet and I feel like a scribe trying to accurately present some aliveness of the moment of my experience.

They might go on: What’s it like for you before everything starts? What do you notice about being the scribe for aliveness? What do you enjoy most about the process? How does your writing process relate to the rest of your life?

Anyway, you see how one thing leads to another when you’re curious. I would then put them in pairs and have them practice powerful questions on each other. One person makes a simple statement and the other person asks a short, open-ended and evocative question. Person number one briefly responds, then pauses. Person number two asks another question. We go on for five minutes.

These conversations would invariably be wondrous both for the questioner and for the person being questioned. I came to realize there were three essential ingredients in this exercise. First is the agreement of both parties and a willingness to have a different kind of conversation. Powerful questions are intrusive and socially inappropriate without some kind of permission, tacit or otherwise, that is given. (e.g. do not try this on your partner without first getting their agreement)

Second, pausing is necessary. If the first person goes on too long, the second person doesn’t get to practice. Saying just a little bit, the first person stops and in that stopping there is a pivot point. Some juncture appears that allows curiosity to enter. The stream of what we already know is interrupted and unseen possibilities can appear.

Third, the asker needs to consciously touch a place of curiosity, of genuine interest. Powerful questions come when we let go of what we already know and begin to wonder about what we don’t know. We’re invited to constantly let go of our opinion and where we think things should be going to follow the aliveness of where they are actually going.

So curiosity is part of what allows something new and interesting to emerge. I have an aversion to writing about what I already know—even if it’s true, it’s kind of boring. So I continue to pursue what it is that I don’t yet know—continue to trust that if I pay attention and follow, the path will appear under my feet.