Musings from the Doc . . .

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Book Review: Bonds That Make Us Free

I read an absolutely amazing book this week.

I read it once before--in fact, I think I reviewed it once before, but I didn't finish reading it that time. I don't think I was really ready for the full implications of what the book was telling me.

What the book proposes is that a lot of the unease, frustration, and anger we feel is rooted in attempts to justify the times when we do the wrong things.

As an example:

A new father is lying in bed at night, and the baby starts crying. His wife doesn't wake up right away.

The father feels the right thing to do is get up and help with the baby.

But he doesn't want to. So he starts coming up with reasons why he shouldn't. The meeting he has in the morning. That he got up last night. That she got a really good nap in after he got home from work.

And he doesn't just stop there--he goes ahead and lets himself get angry with his wife for not getting up. Starts thinking about how little she must be thinking about his wants and feelings to not be jumping up to take care of the kid.

Well, this could lead to one of two actions--he either wakes his wife up and gets her to take care of the kid, or, he gets up and takes care of the kid himself.

In the first case, he doesn't appreciate what his wife did fully, because he feels like he had to goad her into it, and in the second case, he still resents his wife even though he did the nice thing for her. And now he feels like she "owes" him.

So here's the scary thing:

We always think that if we "do" the right thing, then we'll have peace, and that our relationships will work out. "What should I do?" is usually the question we most ask.

But in this case, we can see that, no matter what way the guy chose, he was still hurting the relationship. In other words, what he did wasn't nearly so important as who he was when he was doing them.

The book then takes this a step further, and says that we tend to get into cycles of this with people. Cycles where we see other people as acting irrationally, and we have to act a certain way to try to "control" them, or keep them from acting how we think they're acting. (EG, "I know my wife wants me to fix the sink. But if I just drop everything and go do it, then she'll always expect that. I need her to understand how valuable my time is.")

And then the other person does the same thing with us (EG, "I know I'm nagging him, but if I don't stay on top of him, then it won't ever get done!")

This builds into cycles of blame and frustration, as we become so busy justifying who we are ("Can't he see that I do ____, _____, and _____?") and negating who they are ("He's the one who always _____, _____, and _____!") that we don't ever let our defenses down, and let ourselves see the truth.

And that's what this book is really about, is Truth.

Most of this anger and frustration is caused because of fantasies. Fantasies about what we think we're supposed to be, and fantasies about what we're afraid we might be.

We think we're supposed to be perfect, that we're always supposed to do the right thing, that we're never supposed to hurt anybody and that we're never supposed to mess up. But what we're afraid of is that we're monsters, monsters who do hurt people, monsters who monsters who don't do the right thing, monsters who consistently mess things up.

But the truth is simpler--the truth is we're all just people. People who are struggling, people who are afraid, people who have hope. People who do amazing things, and people who make mistakes.

And when we get away from those caricatures of everybody, of seeing people as being monsters we have to hate, or annoyances who drive us crazy, or even as anybody who can make us be anything other than who we are, that's when we can truly start to have peace.

That's not to say there aren't terrible people out there. One negative review on Amazon says this book is more for "Jerks," and that people who are accustomed to letting people walk all over them should stay away from it, because it will just fuel their fire.

This couldn't be further from the truth. Like I said at the start--this book is not about what you do. A woman with an abusive husband could stay with him or leave him, and still have anger and bitterness and malice in her heart. Leaving him won't take the hurt away by itself.

But a woman who has let go of her false perceptions, a woman who is straightforwardly dealing with truth, a woman who has let go of the caricature of her husband that she's held in her mind--that woman will see, more clearly than ever before, who her husband truly is. Once she's able to let go of the stories she's telling herself about him, once she doesn't need those any more in order to define who she is, then she will truly know whether she has a reason to stay with him, or whether she needs to go.

Because that's the thing the book won't tell you--what to do.

Because for you to have peace, it isn't about being true to who C. Terry Warner thinks who should be. It's about being true to who you know you ought to be, the person who, deep down is really your best self.

That's why the full title of this book is what it is: Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves. Because the book isn't nearly so much about trying to change who we are into someone who is acceptable. It's about letting go of all the self-justification, self-recrimination, and self-analyzing that distorts us and weighs us down, and instead, just being the decent people we really are inside, and being okay with that.

I hope this doesn't all sound like psychobabble. It's a fantastic book that I hope will change my life. I'm definitely having a hard time coming to terms with some of the implications of it. But I'm never going to be able to forget it.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

On Amazon.com

Interview with Joss Whedon about the new collector's edition of Serenity.

Friday, September 07, 2007

Firefly cheap!

If you don't have it yet, go here and get the whole series of that Firefly show you've been hearing about for $20.

It's Amazon's gold box deal, just for today. Snatch it up while you can.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Dreams

I'm always amazed at the ability of dreams to surprise me. Surprise anybody, really.

Since dreams are forged somewhere down in the depths of whatever it is that makes you you, you would think that everything that happened in them would seem fundamentally right. No matter how weird they got, or how sad they got, or how scary they got, they should never quite seem wrong.

I mean yeah, you could be "surprised," but it should be in a Bruce Willis-Sixth-Sense kind of way, a surprise that seems absolutely right the whole time--not a complete blindsided surprise that seems like things shouldn't be like that. Sort of like the difference between being "pretend scared" and "real scared" when you were a kid. You should be able to be wink-wink surprised in dreams, and you can go through the motions of being surprised by something that, deep down, you expect would be the sort of thing that would surprise you.

But it just seems to me that if dreams are coming from the same part of you that's forging your core, your beliefs about how the world works, then things shouldn't happen that are fundamentally contradictory to that.

That's the observation. Now you must want to hear the dream.

I almost didn't blog about it, just because dreams are one of those things that are inherently boring to other people. Just about any dream is pointless if you didn't experience it yourself.

But making this post without saying what dream inspired it would have made you curious and made the dream seem more important than it was. The dream wasn't nearly as important as the observation. And just to prove that, here it is:

My wife and I had parked the car and were walking to a restaurant to meet my folks for dinner. We passed by what looked like a fairly decent hotel that had a sign about some services it offered, including Internet access.

My wife ducked inside through a back door, and I followed her. As we started exploring, though, we realized it wasn't a hotel, but a really nice restaurant, the kind that I could never go to in real life. It had a nostalgic Meet Me in St. Louis feel to it, with lots of wood and textured wallpaper.

A couple people smiled at us conspiratorially and called us cheaters when they realized how we got in.

We nosed around the place for a while, spending quite a bit of time at the magic shop looking at different types of force decks, but then I had to go to the bathroom and so I told Marci I'd be back.

The bathroom was as awesome as the rest of the place, and I spent a while exploring it, too.

By the time I got out, two women were walking holding my crying wife between them.

When I asked her what was wrong, she said something like, "I had to go the bathroom, I just couldn't wait any longer, and I didn't know where to find you . . ."

Not my wife. Not my wife at all. Not the crying because she couldn't find me, and not the confiding in two strangers about anything.

The absolute bizarreness of my wife acting like that woke me up.

See? I told you the observation was more interesting than the dream.

Friday, April 06, 2007

Obscure Movie Review Of The Day: Akeelah and the Bee

I wasn't expecting this to be a nearly perfect movie.

See, here's the thing. If I tell you what this movie's about, you know the whole story. If I say, "It's about a girl from a bad family who goes to a bad school in a bad neighborhood who starts competing in spelling bees," then you can fill in all the blanks. Probably you guess she finds a wise old mentor. Probably you guess a lot of stuff. I know I did, and I was right about all of it.

But here's what I wasn't expecting: Them to get it all exactly right. And, boy howdy, did they get this movie right.

Oh, I was leary, looking for stuff to jump on right from the start. The first thing we see about Akeelah, our introduction to the character, is when her teacher is handing out graded spelling tests. She's handing out Ds here and Fs there and she comes to Akeelah.

"How long did you study for this test?" the teacher asks.

"I didn't," Akeelah responds.

And the teacher hands her her paper face down and says, "See me after class."

And when Akeelah slides her paper to the edge of the desk and peeks at the grade, there's a great big red A+.

Ah-ha!, I thought. I'd caught the writers in their first mistake.

See, it's kind of a rule for writers that if you want to establish dramatic tension, you don't make your hero naturally good at whatever it is they have to do. If you're writing a story about a person who has to survive on a cold, harsh world, you don't make him a survivalist who's had cold-weather survival training. You make him a teenager who's always lived in cushy, warm environments and who's never prepared his own meals.

So if the writers had decided to make Akeelah an abnormally good speller right from the start, they'd blown it right at the start, hadn't they?

Well, no. Because ultimately, this movie isn't about learning how to spell.

Now don't get me wrong--this movie also doesn't make the ridiculous mistake so many movies are tempted to make that just because she's naturally good at this that she can easily go toe-to-toe with kids who, you know, study and stuff. So many movies want us to believe that the hero can win the signing contest or the talent contest against all the others who've spent their whole lives practicing and trying just because the hero suddenly decided they wanted to bad enough. This movie doesn't fall into that trap either.

It takes the time to show how complicated and involved the world of competitive spelling is. But the movie still isn't about spelling.

It's about the battle that each of us has with ourselves and the world around us, the battle between what we know, what we love, what we want to be, what we hope we might be, the battle between all those things and the so-called "realities" of life, the self-doubt, the worries about what people around us are thinking, the fears of rejection. It's a movie about possibilities. Possibilities we dread and possibilities we almost are afraid to dare hope for.

It's all summed up in this quote, which the wise old mentor has Akeelah read off the wall of his office:

Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,
but that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.

We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us.
It is not just in some; it is in everyone.
And, as we let our own light shine,
we consciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

The quote is true. So is the movie.

And when you watch it (And yes, you must watch it), at the end of the movie, when it seems Akeelah has found an exception, when she's about to shrink for the sake of another, and they almost have you thinking that would be okay, remember the quote again.

And when we see that when the impossible happens, the miracle no one believed possible occurred, remember that it was when no one shrunk back--it was when everyone did their best, played off each other, that they could do what no one else had ever done.

Watch it.

And then go out and be the best person you can be, so everybody else can be, too.