I have a confession to make.
When someone that I don’t particularly
like or respect suggests that I read something (or watch something or listen to
something or do something)…I will absolutely refuse to do it. Forever. Or at
the very least, until someone that I do like
or respect -- to an equal or greater degree -- makes the same suggestion.
The irony is that I often don’t remember who or what
triggered my desire to remain ignorant or unexposed to something – or someone –
but once the negative association is there, it takes a hold. Like a dog who has
dug its teeth into a bag of treats or a favorite toy…my determination to avoid
things can be like a vice grip on my personal growth.
Such is the case with Brene Brown.
At some point…someone must have quoted her or mentioned how
good her book was or raved about her TedTalk – The Power of Vulnerability – in my presence and it was someone that
I must not have thought too highly of because I’ve managed…until today…to avoid
what can only be described as an ocean of wisdom and humor and courage – all the
things I value and seek. The internet is awash with books, recorded speeches,
blog posts, and interviews that I have never experienced and now that I’ve
dipped my toe in at the shore, I want to drown in all of her words.
All of them.
I’m neck-deep now having spent 40 minutes on Ted Talks and
another one hour and twenty minutes on a podcast where she was interviewed. I
have placed all three of her books into my Amazon cart and they are all I want
for Christmas now.
How did this happen? How did I go from active avoidance to
uncontrollable obsession? Well…thankfully a person that I do like and respect suggested that I look up something that she
said about the word “should”. I was lamenting, among other things, the inertia of
sitting in my comfy chair reading Rolling
Stone’s ranking of all 141 SNL cast members…which had a link to a funny
critique of the movie Love, Actually.
I started listing the things I should be
doing and her response was
Could be. Could be. Could be.
I acknowledged that could was a much gentler…less judgmental…form
of “should” and that maybe that would be my blog post for the day. And she
said, “Yes. See Brene Brown on should!” Then I bristled for a moment…because of
the now-unidentifiable association to whomever…but started looking.
But I came up empty. When you type someone prolific into Google along with a word like "should", your results set consists of every single thing ever said by or about that person. Every. Single. Word. That’s when I turned to TED…and typed
in her name to the search field. Two talks...the aforementioned one on vulnerability
which has 22 million views….and another one called Listening to Shame. So I read her bio first. Just who the heck is she? A “researcher storyteller” (which is what
I believe myself to be)…but an academic. A college professor in the Department
of Social Work at the University of Houston who has studied Shame for over decade.
Huh? Social Work? Shame? A TEXAN?!
I just don’t know… But hey, it’s only 20 minutes I’m committing to and I’ll
choose the one with the least number
of views because I always root for the underdog.
That was 3 hours ago.
I am so in this moment of wanting to soak up this
awesomeness that I wasn’t really going to write anything today, but I remembered
how the reason (one of the reasons) for starting this blog was so I had a
tablet for consistent writing. An online tablet which would promote some accountability. I am acutely aware that I haven’t posted anything in 11 days. It feels lame.
But I am also waterlogged from swimming in the ocean of Brene’s
words and ideas and I can barely come up with my own to write about -- I am still processing. I don’t feel
bad about it at all, by the way, but
I do need to get back into the habit of writing everyday. So I’ll talk about TV
and anger for a moment and leave it at that.
First, TV is the devil…as in Devil’s Food Cake…something
that I know is going to upset my stomach but I just can’t say no when it is placed
in front of me.
I have been catching up on all the shows I missed while I
was on my TV fast. I have come to the conclusion that even “the good stuff” may
be glorified crap. Ever since taking Seminar in Television in college (yes,
that was a real class and it was fascinating) I have, in the back of my mind,
always wondered if this particular medium could possibly lead to the downfall of
Western Civilization.
Think about it…It is a giant box of pixels that we bring
into our homes and stare at. For hours. We design our living spaces around it.
We organize our schedules according to its output (or did, before the advent of
digital recording). We eat in front of them. In fact, there is an entire
section of the grocery store dedicated to frozen meals that were born from
something called “TV dinners” which were designed to be eaten in front of the giant
box of pixels.
Beyond the attention we pay it, there are the flashes of light
themselves that enter (and alter) the way we see the things and the people that
are shown. You know how when you see someone in person that you’ve seen on TV,
they always look “not quite the same?” It's because TV distorts reality – both in form and
in content. And don’t even get me started on commercials. We had two class
discussions in college on the relationship between TV and advertising that were
akin to the chicken and the egg metaphor. Was TV designed to increase the
population’s exposure to advertising? Or was its invention solely for
entertainment value and it just happened
to be a good way for advertisers to reach consumers? We talked in circles until
the professor made us move on. I
still don’t know the answer.
From my own personal experience, watching television crushes
my creative spirit. Aside from truly educational programming (of which there is precious little), I find that the
only thing I am inspired to do after watching a TV show is to watch another
one. And then another. It doesn’t foster any creativity or thinking for the
most part. Garbage in garbage out. Turns out we aren’t only what we eat, we are
also what we watch – at least I am. Especially when I watch alone. SO….my
November habits may need to become the norm…and only at night when I don’t need
to be productive.
Except Christmas movies. Because Elf.
My other mini-topic…Anger...not the emotion, but the book by the
Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. Reading for 20 minutes each day (and
highlighting or annotating) is one of my new 5 daily rituals and because I
started this practice in an angry moment, this seemed like a good book on which
to launch it. At first, I wasn’t overly impressed with the way this monk
expressed himself on paper – not in a literary sense, anyway. It’s probably
written on a 2nd grade level and as I read the banal prescriptives for
interaction with self and other…I just wasn’t grooving on it. It had
significance, but I felt almost anxious about how unintellectual – how unprofound
it seemed. Until he began talking about how we consumed things...not just what
we ate, but what we watched and listened to, who we spent our time around, what
we read… and how all of those things could feed our anger.
Anger in, anger out.
And then he talked
about caring for our anger – like it was a child – and how taking care of our
wounded self was the foundation for our capacity to show love toward others. I quickly softened toward the lack of flowery
writing and accepted it as instruction for the 7-year-old who resides in my
spirit. Not everything has to have literary significance to be worth
reading.
Like, for instance, a blog.
But I am tinkering with something significant in my mind
that I would love to be able to put down on paper – hopefully not written on a
second grade level. I’m trying to lean into the tension between short-term
discomfort and long-term contentment. Between recklessness and responsibility.
Thanks to my ocean swim this morning, the following words are sloshing around in my head like water caught in my ear:
Courage
Resilience
Audacity
Vulnerability
Enough
How should I…how COULD
I…proceed?
No comments:
Post a Comment