TRANSCRIPT
What do you do when life throws you a curveball? When everything seems to be going well and then something bad happens and it throws you off your track, perhaps knocks you off your track? I think this is the way of life, like right here.
I’ve never actually sat in this chair and recorded here. I prepared my whole morning mentally, getting ready to make videos. I went outside to the spot that I’ve been recording outside, and about two, three minutes into the video, it started pouring rain. It started slowing there, boom! It just opened up, and I was like soaked. I had to run inside with the chair, this big heavy chair, and the camera, and I was trying to shield the camera so it wouldn’t get wet. And then I realized, you know, I could try to film here. Yeah, maybe there are some people around who can hear me talking. Maybe I can talk a little quieter. But I thought, I got thrown a curveball. It wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t what I prepared for.
Of course, it’s minor. It’s not like some of the nasty and really horribly unpleasant and unexpected things that so many people in life go through on a regular basis. People losing their businesses, people losing their jobs, not having enough food to buy. And it’s like, that’s not even in the same league as the simple little thing, oh, I have to film inside in a strange chair and a strange place where I might be heard by other people. It’s like, this is simple. But I think life is full of metaphors, things that represent other things, little ways that we can have windows into seeing more clearly into other people’s lives.
I have a long history of being thrown off my track, being knocked off my track, being rejected, having the world change around me. My parents one day telling us we’re moving, we’re going somewhere else, losing all my friends, having to start over again. Having some kid in school decide he doesn’t like me, and suddenly everybody sides with him against me, and it’s horrible. Having a teacher who doesn’t like me after the previous year, having had a teacher who did like me. I felt special. I felt cared about, nurtured. I sort of felt like I had a mother figure and a teacher. And the next year, I have some hag who’s mean and nasty and hates it that I’m outspoken and smart and clever and alive.
Relationships that I’ve been in, lovely relationships, I’m paying. They end, and I’m all alone, and having to deal with my loneliness. I guess what I’m getting at, and it’s something that I talked about in another video, a video on flexibility training, is the value in being flexible and rolling with life’s punches. I have seen people who have become brittle in life. They’ve become rigid. They’ve become with this mentality that they, well, they’re not going to move for life. Life has to move out of their way. They live for comfort, and sometimes they pad themselves into so much comfort that when something does happen that’s unexpected, they are not prepared for it. They have lost their flexibility.
I think it can happen to countries too, and I think a lot of times it happens when people become too strong, too confident, too much with the belief that nothing can break them, nothing can stop them, nothing can change them, that they have control, they have power. I think of jobs, roles that people have professionally where they have all the power, and even that can shift. People get old.
I think of some people I know. I once interviewed a psychiatrist. He’s now dead. He was the head of a big important psychoanalytic training institution. This was a published psychiatrist. He was a very important man. People listened to him. People respected him. Psychoanalysts went to him for supervision. Psychoanalysts who supervised other psychoanalysts who supervised other therapists who themselves had clients who paid a lot of money. This guy was at the top of the food chain.
Well, I met him when he had passed his ark. He was older. I didn’t know it at the time, but people afterward told me, and I kind of saw it when I interviewed him, that he was starting to have Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t think straight. He had all this confidence, but it was like not really confident because there was a part of his voice that was like it knew it inside himself. He wasn’t admitting it on camera that it just wasn’t working anymore. He couldn’t keep his train of thought. His memory was shot. He couldn’t remember things. He would fumble over words, important psychoanalytic words, important psychoanalytic concepts. It was breaking my heart to interview him.
Now that I think about it, I kind of wished I’d been able to take a step back and just talk about what was really going on. Even just turn off the camera and say, “Let’s just talk about your life. What is it like? How does it feel?” But I think he wouldn’t have talked about it. And when I talked well with other people about what he was like back then, this was a guy who was the god of his universe. And it was a universe that was all about a top-down universe of power and insight into other people and theories of human psychology. And suddenly, he was on the wrong side of it.
So maybe I’ll make another plug for this thing called flexibility training. For me to be flexible, to remain humble, to keep, well, the blood flowing to all areas of my body, to be able to get up when I fall down, knowing that I will fall down. Doing things actually that keep myself living outside of my comfort zone, not just for the sake of keeping myself outside of my comfort zone, but because that’s where interesting stuff is happening.
Also having observed so often that people who live primarily for comfort and in comfort are boring. They’re not that motivated. They don’t contribute that much. A lot of times what I’ve seen is they have pulled out of life. They’re living for their own private concerns. They’re living in a bubble of just themselves as the king of their universe, hedonism. They’re living often just to be happy here and now. And maybe they have a couple of people who they are, who are in their bubble, who they also want to help keep happy. Maybe they have children, and they just live for their children. But it’s like screw the outside world. They don’t care about the outside world.
And often what I’ve seen is even when they have children, inside of those little private bubbles of rigidity and comfort, they don’t even care about their children that much. Often I even hear them say to me sometimes, it’s like, “Yeah, this is really no world for kids to grow up in. This is a rotten, miserable world. Humanity is probably going to crash and burn in 20 or 30 years.” But you know what? I’ve got my kids now, so I’m not really concerned about that.
And it highlights so often that people don’t have children for the sake of their children, not for the sake of raising wonderful, developed, mature, self-actualized human beings. And not only that, they don’t have children with any concept of contributing to the greater world, to the good of the world. They might say that they do. They might. A lot of people, it’s a great defense. “Oh, I’m having children because I believe the children are our future. Let them grow, and they will learn.” Or they might say, “I’m having children because I want to raise my children to be the best people they can.” A really good defense. But a lot of times what I see is they’re not doing that. They’re having children for them, for something for them to do, a purpose, for status. There’s a lot of status in that.
And sometimes when life throws them off their track, and I’ve seen people who everything seems to be going for them with their little bubble of a family system, their little bubble of comfort, maybe they lose their job, or maybe their wife loses her job, or maybe something bad happens to one of their kids, and they have it costs a lot of money, or they get a disease, or something like that. A parent gets sick, and they can’t function so well anymore, or they divorce, and they don’t pick themselves up so quickly. For me, all the more reason to get out into the world, to be more flexible, to go with the flow of life, to live in sync with.
Life’s ups and downs, but the most important thing is to keep growing, to keep discovering who I am on the inside, who I really am. Sometimes, not the prettiest. It’s always difficult, it’s always complicated. But the more I do it, it’s like the stronger I get, and I realize more and more I will survive. I do survive. I have survived. I’ve survived some pretty unpleasant things.
And what I’ve observed in peers of mine, people I’ve known for decades, is the less they develop that connection with their true self on the inside. Sometimes they actually do the opposite of connecting with themselves; they push that self away because that self says, “You’re doing it wrong. You’re living a fake life.” But the more that people do connect with that true self on the inside, the more that they can weather life’s difficulties. And the less they connect with that self on the inside, the more that life can throw them over, such that I’ve seen some people can’t get up again.
And sometimes I think that was part of my job as a therapist, to be that hand reaching out to people who had lost that flexibility, who had come to their final straw, and there was no self left on the inside to help them. And maybe that my hand out could be the hand that helped pull them up. Not necessarily even a real literal hand, but more just an ear, a caring soul, a heart. Someone who, well, maybe could lend a little of my flexibility to them, a little of my surplus flexibility and self-love, turning it into altruism and nurturance for someone who maybe was open to learning some new lessons about the value of flexibility.