Thrive, p.12
Thrive, page 12
While we did not survive as a couple, at least we’ve survived in the joint parenting of our daughters—and the children are usually the biggest casualties of a bad divorce.
“God,” Isabella said one day during a recent vacation, “it’s hard to remember you guys are divorced.” For some reason, that made me very, very happy. It felt like I had reached the end of a long and arduous journey. And we were all the better for having made it. For the sake of our inner peace and happiness, as well as for the sake of all the many children whose parents get divorced every year, this is a journey well worth taking.
Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
—CARRIE FISHER
There is nothing that we need more today than having proportion restored to disproportion, and separating our everyday worries and preoccupations from what is truly important. An amazing array of seemingly incompatible people and activities can coexist in our lives with harmony and a sense of order when we find an unambiguous center in ourselves.
I felt that when I first went to India at the age of seventeen. I had gone to Visva-Bharati University, founded in Shantiniketan by Rabindranath Tagore, to study comparative religion. As part of my course, I visited the holy shrine of Benaras, where dead bodies floated by on the Ganges as part of a Hindu ritual of spiritual transition, and emaciated holy men knelt in prayer among goats and pigeons. Pilgrims, most in rags but one in a gold sari, listened to the nonstop buzz of gurus and hawkers. It was chaotic, to be sure, and yet, in the middle of the chaos, I felt an unfathomable peace. I knew then that my life was never going to be lived on a serene mountaintop, but I also knew that it was possible to find peace and wisdom in the middle of a bustling marketplace, that we can achieve that elusive combination between stillness and the stream of the world—that we can be in the world but not of the world.
The seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal said that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” When we have learned to sit quietly in a room alone, we can maintain that inner connection that allows life to proceed from the inside out, whether we are alone or in a crowd of screaming people. And we can remain in this state of being no matter how much we’re doing. It seems so simple, and when I’m in that place I wonder why I ever leave it. But it takes tremendous commitment and dedication to hold to it and, when I slip out of it, to catch myself quickly—again and again and again, and without judgment.
At HuffPost we developed a course-correcting free smartphone app called GPS for the Soul. It provides tools to help us return to a state of calm and balance. I know it’s something of a paradox to look to an app to help us reconnect to ourselves, but there’s no reason not to use the technology we always have in our pockets or purses to help free us from technology. Think of it as spiritual training wheels. GPS for the Soul connects us to a personalized guide, with music, poetry, breathing exercises, and pictures of our loved ones, to help us destress and recenter. You can also access the guides of experts, other users, or your friends.
It always amazes me how quickly I am able to move back to that centered place, and how it gets even easier as the path back becomes more and more familiar. We all have within us the ability to move from struggle to grace, whatever the challenges we encounter. When I’m in that “bubble of grace,” it doesn’t mean that the everyday things that used to bother, irritate, and upset me disappear; they don’t, but they no longer have the power to bother, irritate, or upset me. And when the really hard things come our way—death, sickness, loss—we are better able to deal with them instead of being overwhelmed by them.
I faced one such big test on March 4, 2012. That’s the day I got the sort of call every parent dreads more than anything else: “Mommy, I can’t breathe.” It was Christina, my oldest daughter, in her senior year at Yale, two months away from graduating.
Looking back on that March day as I was frantically driving from New York to the emergency room in New Haven, and later when we left the emergency room with my sedated daughter crying in my arms, and later still over the hard weeks that followed, I focused on all that I was grateful for: that my daughter was alive, that she had a loving family that rallied around her, and that she wanted to get well. Christina had struggled with drugs before, but we had thought that was behind her. And never before had it gotten to this point.
Everything else I thought was important in my life fell away. Over the next year, until Christina decided to go public with her addiction, only our family, her closest friends, and my daughters’ godmothers knew. I felt like it was her story and her life—and, therefore, her decision if and when to talk about it. I was proud of her when, thirteen months later, she decided to write about her struggle:
Writing this blog a year ago would have been impossible, because of the shame and the deep guilt I felt about being an addict. I have never been abused or neglected. I didn’t grow up in an alcoholic home. I have been blessed with an unconditionally loving family and I have been given every opportunity to thrive. Why then? Why cause the people who love me so much pain? Why be seemingly intent on throwing it all away?
The honest answer is: I don’t know. What I do know—and I have grappled with this over the past 13 months—is that addiction is a disease. It is progressive, it can be fatal and it can touch anyone.
My life as it is today was unthinkable thirteen months ago. Yes, I mean the particulars—I have a steady job and healthy, loving relationships—but more than that I’ve learned to be vulnerable. I’ve learned how to apologize and how to forgive. I’ve learned how much strength it takes to let go. If writing this can help one person feel a little less alone, if it encourages one person to ask for help, if it allows one person to know that no matter how hopeless it feels right now, it can get better, then that is enough.
“Here’s what no one tells you about sobriety,” Christina says. “Giving up drugs is easy compared to dealing with the emotions drugs protected you from.” Learning to be vulnerable without shame and accepting our emotions without judgment becomes much easier when we realize that we are more than our emotions, our thoughts, our fears, and our personalities. And the stronger the realization, the easier it becomes to move from struggle to grace.
The harder we press on a violin string, the less we can feel it. The louder we play, the less we hear.… If I “try” to play, I fail; if I race, I trip. The only road to strength is vulnerability.
—STEPHEN NACHMANOVITCH
Moving from struggle to grace sums up, as well, the experience of childbirth—going from a body racked with pain to the miracle of birth all in a few hours (if you’re lucky). For all our medical advances, that miracle has never been diminished over the millennia. The staggering reality that we mortals can actually accomplish the act of human creation leaves us changed forever. It’s a miracle that we honor with a yearly celebration until we die.
Having longed to have children for years, I was over the moon when, at thirty-eight, I finally became a mother. A few hours after Christina’s birth, I had another grace-filled experience that, as I’ve since discovered, an amazing number of women have also had. And as personal diaries from previous generations show, this is not just a modern phenomenon.
I lay in bed nestling Christina to me for hours. When I finally grew sleepy, we put her in the crib next to my bed. A few moments later, after everyone had left the room, I began trembling convulsively. I tried to calm myself with the same soothing words I had just offered to my baby: “It’s all right … it’s all right.”
And then I stopped shaking. I had left my body and was suddenly looking down at myself, at Christina, at the tuberoses on the nightstand, at the entire room. I had no fear at all; I knew I would return. And I was awash in an enormous sense of well-being and strength. It was as if a curtain had been pulled back to give me a glimpse of the wholeness of birth, life, and death. Seeing them all at once, I could accept them all. For I don’t know how long, I hovered in that state of almost tangible peace. Then I watched a nurse enter the room; as she touched me, she jolted me back into the hospital reality. I returned with a great sense of confidence and joy. The anxiety of taking Christina home had disappeared. I knew we would be fine.
In our daily lives, moving from struggle to grace requires practice and commitment. But it’s in our hands. I’ve come to believe that living in a state of gratitude is the gateway to grace. Gratitude has always been for me one of the most powerful emotions. Grace and gratitude have the same Latin root, gratus. Whenever we find ourselves in a stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off mindset, we can remember that there is another way and open ourselves to grace. And it often starts with taking a moment to be grateful for this day, for being alive, for anything. Christina found tremendous value during her recovery by doing a nightly list of all she was grateful for that day and sharing it with three friends, who, in turn, emailed her their gratitude lists. And she has continued this practice to this day. The Oxford clinical psychologist Mark Williams suggests the “ten finger gratitude exercise,” in which once a day you list ten things you’re grateful for and count them out on your fingers. Sometimes it won’t be easy. But that’s the point—“intentionally bringing into awareness the tiny, previously unnoticed elements of the day.”
Gratitude exercises have been proven to have tangible benefits. According to a study by researchers from the University of Minnesota and the University of Florida, having participants write down a list of positive events at the close of a day—and why the events made them happy—lowered their self-reported stress levels and gave them a greater sense of calm at night.
I find that I’m not only grateful for all the blessings in my life, I’m also grateful for all that hasn’t happened—for all those close shaves with “disaster” of some kind or another, all the bad things that almost happened but didn’t. The distance between them happening and not happening is grace.
And then there are the disasters that did happen, that leave us broken and in pain. For me, such a moment was losing my first baby. I was thirty-six and ecstatic at the prospect of becoming a mother. But night after night, I had restless dreams. Night after night I could see that the baby—a boy—was growing within me, but his eyes would not open. Days became weeks, and weeks turned into months. Early one morning, barely awake myself, I asked out loud, “Why won’t they open?” I knew then what was only later confirmed by the doctors. The baby’s eyes were not meant to open; he died in my womb before he was born.
Women know that we do not carry our unborn babies only in our wombs. We carry them in our dreams and in our souls and in our every cell. Losing a baby brings up so many unspoken fears: Will I ever be able to carry a baby to term? Will I ever be able to become a mother? Everything felt broken inside. As I lay awake during the many sleepless nights that followed, I began to sift through the shards and splinters, hoping to find reasons for my baby’s stillbirth.
Staggering through a minefield of hard questions and partial answers, I began to make my way toward healing. Dreams of my baby gradually faded, but for a time it seemed as if the grief itself would never lift. My mother had once given me a quotation from Aeschylus that spoke directly to these hours: “And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” At some point, I accepted the pain falling drop by drop and prayed for the wisdom to come.
I had known pain before. Relationships had broken, illnesses had come, death had taken people I loved. But I had never known a pain like this. What I learned through it is that we are not on this earth to accumulate victories, or trophies, or experiences, or even to avoid failures, but to be whittled and sandpapered down until what’s left is who we truly are. This is the only way we can find purpose in pain and loss, and the only way to keep returning to gratitude and grace.
I love saying grace—even silently—before meals and when I travel around the world, observing different traditions. When I was in Tokyo in 2013 for the launch of HuffPost Japan I loved learning to say itadakimasu before every meal. It simply means “I receive.” When I was in Dharamsala, India, every meal started with a simple prayer.
Growing up in Greece, I was used to a simple blessing before each meal, sometimes a silent one, even though I wasn’t brought up in a particularly religious household. “Grace isn’t something that you go for, as much as it’s something you allow,” wrote John-Roger, the founder of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. “However you may not know grace is present, because you have conditioned the way you want it to come, for example, like thunder or lightning, with all the drama, rumbling, and pretense of that. In fact, grace comes in very naturally, like breathing.”
On a day when the wind is perfect, the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty. Today is such a day.
—RUMI
Both monks and scientists have affirmed the importance of gratitude in our lives. “It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race,” wrote Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk from Kentucky, “though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.”
What the foremost researchers in the field of gratitude, Robert Emmons of the University of California, Davis, and Michael McCullough of the University of Miami, have established is that “a life oriented around gratefulness is the panacea for insatiable yearnings and life’s ills.… At the cornerstone of gratitude is the notion of undeserved merit. The grateful person recognizes that he or she did nothing to deserve the gift or benefit; it was freely bestowed.” Gratitude works its magic by serving as an antidote to negative emotions. It’s like white blood cells for the soul, protecting us from cynicism, entitlement, anger, and resignation. It’s summed up in a quote I love (attributed to Imam Al-Shafi’i, an eighth-century Muslim jurist): “My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me.”
The Power of the Hunch: When Your Inner Voice Speaks, Shut Up and Listen
One big indicator of the absence of wisdom is our failure to heed warning signs. History is filled with examples. The consequences of ignoring warning signs came to life for me a few years ago when I was visiting Pompeii. Walking around the ancient city, I was reminded how its people were wiped out in AD 79 by a volcanic eruption.
There had been many warning signs, including a severe earthquake in AD 62, tremors over the ensuing years, springs and wells that dried up, dogs that ran away, and birds that no longer sang. And then the most obvious warning sign: columns of smoke belching out of Mount Vesuvius before the volcano blew its top, burying the city and its inhabitants under sixty feet of ash and volcanic rock.
The warning tremors had been dismissed as “not particularly alarming.” The warning signs of impending catastrophes are all around us today, pointing out the gulf between what we know we should be doing—on climate change, on growing economic inequalities, on the failed war on drugs—and what we’re choosing to do instead. And the source of this gulf is an absence of wisdom.
One big source of wisdom is intuition, our inner knowing. We’ve all experienced it: a hunch, an inkling, our inner voice telling us to do something or not to do something. We hear the message, and it feels right, even if we can’t explain why. Or for those of us who are more visual, we see something. A flickering insight, sometimes gone by the time it has registered if we don’t learn to pay attention to it—the smile on the face of a child seen from the window of our train rushing by a playground. Even when we’re not at a fork in the road, wondering what to do and trying to hear that inner voice, our intuition is always there, always reading the situation, always trying to steer us the right way. But can we hear it? Are we paying attention? Are we living a life that keeps the pathway to our intuition unblocked? Feeding and nurturing our intuition, and living a life in which we can make use of its wisdom, is one key way to thrive, at work and in life.
Intuition, not intellect, is the “open sesame” of yourself.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
There are some for whom the word “intuition” conjures the idea of hippy-dippy New Age thinking, or something to do with the paranormal. But, in fact, from the beginning of recorded history, we have had the recognition of a kind of wisdom that is not the product of logic and reason. Western culture is a monument to reason. It gave us the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution and the information age, and all that has followed. But it wasn’t reason alone that gave us those triumphs, nor is it reason alone that gets us through the day.
The third-century philosopher Plotinus wrote that there are three kinds of knowledge: “opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense, of the second, dialectic, of the third, intuition.” The Internet has made the first two types of knowledge very easy to come by. But it has taken us further away from that illumination, or wisdom, that is essential to living a life that matters.
Science has confirmed how important intuition is in the way we make decisions. “It has long been realized,” psychologists Martin Seligman and Michael Kahana wrote, “that many important decisions are not arrived at by linear reasoning, but by intuition.”
They go on to describe intuition-based decision making as: “a) rapid, b) not conscious, c) used for decisions involving multiple dimensions, d) based on vast stores of prior experiences, e) characteristic of experts, f) not easily or accurately articulated afterwards, and g) often made with high confidence.”
