At 85, my father went through a brief period in which he was in and out of hospitals. There was a lot of communication between family members regarding what did – or didn’t – need to be done. I found myself mentally on call, though most of the time I was unneeded. The business of waiting for news that I would have to do something put me into a state of hyper alertness more stressful than any event that occurred during that time. I was in mental overdrive. My focus was fixated on a future over which I had no control and on living up to responsibilities I could not yet define. I was overwhelmed – not from what was happening, but by the idea of what might happen.

During World War II, the Nazis developed the Blitzkrieg – in which columns of tanks rushed into Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. As Ryan Holiday says in his book, The Obstacle Is the Way, the Blitzkrieg was constructed to capitalize on the enemy flinching when faced with what seemed to be an “overwhelming force.” The enemy had to fall apart, otherwise the Blitzkrieg strategy wouldn’t work. It was Dwight D. Eisenhower who demanded his generals no longer see the situation as a disaster. He envisioned taking advantage of the onslaught of Germans, rather than recoiling. They would bend, not break, in the face of the upset. Holiday says the Allies were “. . . able to see the opportunity inside the obstacle rather than simply the obstacle that threatened them.” This new perception helped change the course of the battles to follow.

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Sometimes I watch a program called, Dr. Pimple Popper. For the uninitiated: this is a show about a dermatologist who attempts to resolve extreme skin conditions, including the removal of some dramatic, severe lumps and bumps. At first, based on both title and concept, I didn’t understand why anyone would ever want to watch it. I don’t recall what led me to sit through my first episode, but I am now up-to-date and have seen them all. I have discovered why I like to watch it. Most of the patients come in believing they are trapped and diminished by something beyond their control, and leave feeling freed of that sense of limitation. This kind of transformation makes for a satisfying story - though every happy ending marks a new beginning and not everyone is prepared to tend to that themselves.

A recent episode included a woman with lesions and scars, but her previous medical tests showed thickened skin from chronic scratching and rubbing, which meant the damage to her skin was self-created (factitial). There was no skin disease or underlying condition. But the woman didn’t believe she was creating the problem. The doctor told her she had the power to change the pattern. The patient seemed open to the idea at first, but then said, “It just puts the burden back on me.”

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Over six months ago, I was summoned for jury duty. As we all know, it’s a very good and noble thing to do one’s civic duty; however, I did not want to go. The other times I’ve been summoned, I was excused. So, with my dad having just died, and one or two other factors at play, I submitted my explanation and hoped to be excused again. This time, though, I was not. My summons was just delayed. During this period I was busy with executor duties, but still able to routinely find the time to dread going to jury duty.

I am a person who is often inclined to stay home. As a child, I remember looking at our pear-shaped, gray tabby, Muffy, wishing for her situation – the permanently excused life of a cat. Though she occasionally ventured out to the front steps of our house to observe life, once done, she could quickly return to the mother ship, something I often wished for at that time.

The first day of jury duty was spent in a very large, open room with floor-to-ceiling windows, a panoramic view of downtown, and lots of people. From 8:30 to 4:30 we waited to be called to a courtroom for voir dire – the jury selection process – but the majority of us were not called. Mostly I didn’t know or understand what was coming next, only that I couldn’t go home. By the end of the next day I was selected for a trial. For a time, my routine involved arriving early at the courthouse, going to the twelfth floor, putting my lunch in the refrigerator, chatting with fellow jurors, following the bailiff, lining up, being instructed, etc. 

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I was seventeen and had recently performed in our high school play. A fellow cast member approached me one day and told me his brother (who went to a different high school) had seen me in the play and would like to go out with me. He then took out a family photo and pointed to his brother. I looked at the boy in the picture and facetiously said something like, “Hubba hubba”.  The guy in the picture was cute but I had no desire to go out with him. However, I felt uncomfortable rejecting the idea outright, and thus it was that the guy was given the OK to call me.

And he did. I was chatty and friendly, though resistant, and we set a place and time for meeting. As luck would have it, it snowed heavily right before our date and I used this as an excuse for canceling. But the boy rescheduled. I did not want to go, but I did. It was raining that day. I wore my raincoat with the hood up and waited for him outside the frozen yogurt place. While dragging him on a hunt to buy a present for someone, I talked a lot, occasionally allowing him to participate.

We returned to my house and stood outside. I reached out to shake his hand – a cordial and professional thank you and goodbye. He said he would leave it to me whether we got together again. Later, I wrote in my journal that he was a good guy and that he’d left it to me, which I appreciated and would not be acting upon. But he persisted. We got together many times after that. About ten years later, that guy and I married.

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I cannot remember which birthday it was; I think I was turning thirteen. Unbeknownst to me, my Mom was attempting to orchestrate a small surprise on my behalf. I remember my friend Wendy asking me to go somewhere in a manner that seemed out of the norm. My antennae went up; it felt as though I was being covertly steered. Things were happening, behind the scenes, over which I had no control. I became uncomfortable and resistant. The thing is – I liked birthdays and I trusted my friends and family. It was a knee-jerk reaction: I wanted to know what was going on. In the end, due to my lack of cooperation and hyper-awareness, I effectively ruined my own surprise.

On the other hand, as a child, I once hid a dollar in hopes I’d forget where it was and happily discover it later. When I eventually did find the dollar, even though I’d forgotten about it, the experience was lackluster. Having engineered my own surprise, I just knew too much. It’s those incalculable factors – in life and in story telling – that make things so interesting and joyful. I had wanted the delight a surprise can bring but without any of the unknowns and uncertainties. As the years have gone by, I still can’t consider myself an embracer of surprise. But recently, I encountered a surprise that made me think about them differently.

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When I was a child, my mother took me shopping for shoes. I tried on a pair; she pressed on the toes, squeezed the sides, and instructed me to walk around the store. Then she asked, “Will you wear them?”  I stared down at my feet, hoping to find the answer there. The question was difficult. What if, for some reason, I did not wear them? It seemed important - maybe too important. And that importance weighed on me. The more I pondered the question under the dominant influence of my mother’s interest and concern, the more tentative I became.

 During my school years, I believed almost everything was important. In high school, I had trouble sleeping for a year because of that belief. There is a way to redefine importance so it doesn’t lead to indecision, insecurity, manic behavior and/or sleep deprivation. Focusing on interest more than importance can put us in a naturally engaged, unpressured position. For most of high school I didn’t think I was interested in anything. In truth, I was focusing so much on assignments and grades and so little on what was compelling to me, I didn’t even realize just how interested I was. I had accidentally taken myself out of the equation.

 Our human minds are capable of making us feel wobbly about almost anything, and the story of importance sets the stage for just how much we wobble. A so-called important decision is much harder to make than a seemingly unimportant one. And we believe things are important when we think our happiness is somehow on the line, and that the power to be happy lies outside of us.

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For many years, whenever my husband went out and was the slightest bit late in returning, my youngest son would inevitably declare, “He’s dead.”  It wasn’t just his father; he routinely came to this conclusion regardless of the person or circumstances. He was also quick to diagnose physical symptoms as cancer or, less specifically, something terminal.  When we watched movies together, at the start of every film he would question why a character was upset or happy, ask what had happened, or demand explanations for just about everything. We encouraged him to wait and allow the story to unfold. There simply wasn’t enough information available to answer. But he continued asking – striving to pin things down that were still in the process of unfolding.

 

Watching my son rush toward answers (even unwanted and wrong ones) sheds light on how my own preoccupation with solutions and outcomes takes me out of the flow and into anxiety. I might believe it’s the unknown that’s causing my angst but, in truth, labeling uncertainties as “problems,” as well as the urgency to fix them, creates the distress and unease.

 

A bud needs time to open. There is no manual or mechanical method for expediting that process. It has to happen on its own using the natural intelligence that knows how to bloom. Noodling with it won’t help and most likely will hurt. We don’t call a bud a problem because it has yet to bloom. An experience can also be seen similarly – as in progress, in the process of blooming into the next thing. This is a less stressful way of receiving life and keeps us working with things rather than trying to fix them.  

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When I first started art school it wasn’t uncommon for me to periodically melt down. I perceived myself as under great pressure – time-wise and creatively – and feared I wouldn’t be able to pull it all together. With my focus fixated on external conditions and demands, I had a hard time functioning well. I was staring at aspects of my reality as though they were parts of a thousand-piece puzzle I had to assemble in ten minutes. My mind jumped from one piece to the next saying, “I don’t know where this one goes; I don’t know where that one goes; I don’t know . . .” I felt insecure and overwhelmed because confidence is an inside job and cannot be known while our attention remains outwardly fixed.

 

Sometimes I was so overwhelmed I’d get in the shower and weep. Afterwards, I’d wash up on the shore of my bed, and then, soon . . . get up and do the assignment. Post panic, I allowed myself to return to ideas and inspirations, and use my inner (rather than outer) vision. In this way, I reunited with confidence. I didn’t gain confidence by forcing myself into action, but by letting my focus shift back to me – breaking the spell of external demands. 

 

In an interview, comedian and late-night host Conan O’Brien spoke of suffering from intense anxiety (a familial trait) all his life.  He said there’s one thing that has always gotten him through.  “At my very core there is this tiny little seed of pure confidence . . . It’s sometimes hard for me to find . . . but it’s there.”  It’s common to think we need a lot of confidence to create what we want, in which case feeling confident can seem impossible, but a seed is actually plenty.  And when we know confidence exists at the core of who we are, then we know where to look for it, as well as where it cannot be found.

 

I watched video in which a five-year-old boy at a karate dojo tried to break a board with a kick. His teacher coached him, but the boy fell down the first time he tried. The boy kicked again but did not use enough force. He cried and rubbed his eyes. The rest of the children cheered him on by chanting his name.  He continued to cry. The teacher reminded him he could do it. The boy tried again and failed, but then, in a split second, something in his countenance and attitude changed and his next kick broke the board.  The children cheered, ran in, and hugged him. Though surrounded by encouragement and support, it was his internal shift that was key. He went from staring at something he couldn’t yet do, to rooting himself inward where he found that seed of confidence – his power.

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My father died recently. He was eighty-five years old and died in his sleep. When we arrived at his house, the police officer told us we could look at the body if we wished. The emergency care workers had laid it on the floor in his bedroom. After some time, I walked up the steps and peered in from the doorway. There it was – covered with a sheet – and the first thing I thought was how very small his body was – much too small to have housed him.   

All that intelligence; he was an idea-, word-, movie-, book-loving, writing, teaching, leading director of all sorts with an unrelenting persistence and stubbornness. Everything I knew about my father, which was certainly not his totality, must have streamed through his physical self but couldn’t have been contained in it. 

It made me think of neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor’s 2008 TED Talk in which she describes suffering a hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain. Her language-centers, memory, and logic gradually went “offline.” She describes being unable to define the boundaries of her body – seemingly blending molecularly with her environment and losing her personal identity. She says she knew a great peacefulness. “I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie liberated from her bottle . . .. I remember thinking there’s no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny, little body.” 

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My mother was five years old, almost six, when she became so ill she was taken to the hospital in an ambulance; she had contracted polio. It would be another ten years, around 1953, before the vaccine would be made available. In the 1940’s and 50’s, polio was peaking and understandably there was a lot of fear of the risk of paralysis and possibly death. But my mom doesn’t remember being frightened or missing her parents while in the hospital during her quarantine. She felt cared for, she felt safe, and the effects of the polio eventually faded and her body recuperated. Her mother, on the other hand, suffered exhaustion for many months afterwards. The emotional toll had been great.  My mother actually lived the experience; while her mother lived through a projection of what might happen – a projection that frightened her so much, it left her depleted. 

When I was eight I was so frightened of school the only thing I wanted was not to feel so afraid any more. I locked myself in the bathroom, I hid, I even jumped out of a (slowly) moving car to try to escape going to school. One night I slept under my bed, on the wooden floor, without a blanket or pillow so the bed would appear unused and give the illusion I had left. At age five, my mother had a logical reason to be frightened – separated from her parents, in a hospital by herself.  Objectively, at age eight, I did not. Yet I was terrified and she wasn’t. But my mother’s premise was that she was safe, her life was good, and people were taking care of her. I was operating from another premise. 

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