about happiness

Stick this in your brain somewhere you can find it:
It takes time and effort to be happy.
Lots of time and plenty of effort.
And it costs something, too.
Usually the price is pain - emotional, mental, psychic.
It does not come easily.
It does come, though.

I held fast to some ideas,
still do, in fact.

If you can imagine yourself some way,
you can be that way. And actually
you will eventually be that way.
Really.

Hope exists in the sure knowledge
that this situation, this reality will change.
It truly will not remain
the same.

I am not the center of the universe
nor do I control my reality. I am surrounded
by independent actors, all
of whom can delight me, surprise me, disappoint me,
hurt me, affect
my course in life presenting me with opportunities.
Opportunities for
there are no mistakes, only
opportunities to learn.

If I could be how and where I want
to be, I would. Since I am not there, I am unable
to be, obviously. I am where
I am supposed to be.
Really.

Langston Hughes wrote: Hold fast to dreams,
for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged butterfly
unable to fly.

I dream.

about life's teachers

I always thought my teachers in life would be loving and generous. "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." I thought I'd have gurus at whose feet I could sit, soaking up wisdom and knowledge of the universe, becoming enlightened myself.

After enough rough times, however, I realized that my teachers didn't wear flowing orange or white robes and sit in the lotus position. My teachers were bad relationships, difficult work environments, painful childhood experiences, awful family holidays, needy or mean or superficial friends, and disappointments galore. These were the forges for tempering my extremes, taming my expectations, learning my limitations, and establishing my boundaries. When I didn't fit, I got to see where it had gone awry. Why had I picked that person, or job, or friend? Why did I stay so long in such pain, dissatisfaction, discomfort? What prevented me from accepting life on life's terms? How did I get in my own way, preventing myself from having what I wanted and loving what I had?

"May the road rise up to meet you" came to mean that when I was ready to face something about myself - some fear or unrealistic expectation - all of a sudden I'd be in situation after situation where I had the chance to act out and experience my dysfunttion over and over again until I was good and ready to change.

I found I needed some non-judgmental way to characterize my learning process. It was not helpful for me to berate myself for being stupid or "sick" when I kept returning to painful situations and people. I was victimizing myself far more than anyone else victimized me. So I learned to call my learning and change process "information-gathering." I needed to have enough information to make a decision, a change, an accommodation, a shift in attitude or behavior. I could only get such information by returning to the "scene of the crime" - the situation or person with which I engaged so negatively. I had to prove to myself that I had tried everything to rectify the situation and so give myself permission to act or leave or change. Above all, I needed to observe my own behavior time and again until I fully realized that it was I who was responsible for my situation either by remaining overlong or by attempting fruitlessly to change others.

It took me quite a long time to spot patterns, to recognize early on the signs of an infelicitous situation or liaison and so avoid engagement and consequent pain. I learned that guilt is what I feel when I'm doing what I want to do rather than someone else's wishes of me. Guilt is a sign that I am on my own path and surrounded by people who don't want me to succeed on it. I learned that any time I say "I should" do anything, I am embarking on the path to future resentment and martyrdom. If I do anything, let me choose to do it freely with no future recriminations of self or others. I learned that I am honorable, well-intentioned and generally well-behaved. Confident in my own character, I have no cause for guilt, regret or admonition from myself and no reason to expect, allow or accept it from others.

about anonymity in 12 step programs

AA's 12th Tradition (used in other 12-step programs):

Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.

Tradition 12 seems like a Step to me. It's so spiritual in its focus on anonymity. Someone said it well: "What is shared in meetings is more important than who said it."

The hard part for me is to remember that I, too, am a personality. When I start thinking that what I share is really important, people really need to hear me, blah blah blah ... well, I've put my own personality before the very principles I am attempting to convey. I become the great "I am" and start to think of myself as being uniquely capable of transmitting the message of recovery. Suddenly, I've convinced myself that I am the person everyone needs to hear!

Sure. Snore. How incredibly boring. Yet predictable.

As a lifelong people-pleaser, caretaker, enabler, mind-reader and problem-fixer, I am incredibly susceptible to believing my own propaganda. It gives me a reason to live. Plus I get such a rush from being indispensable. Of course, pretty soon someone lets me know that I am really very dispensable, and my input or advice isn't needed, thank you very much.

I'm pretty sure I set the stage for that when I don't go to meetings regularly. When I go to meetings, I am reminded that I am one among many. This is truly a "we" program. Only by straying from the meetings do I start to think this is an "I" program.

My perspective is great and will help some people and others, not so much. Maybe I will help them someday, or maybe never. The point is that there are so many other terrific people in the rooms and on-line that can help me and other people. We all help one another in 12-Step programs. I don't do it by myself. For that, I am grateful.

about making change

Changing oneself is an incredible challenge. And that may be the issue. It seems like such an incredible challenge, like climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. So break it down. Make it smaller. Take one step at a time. Begin at the beginning, not even having the end in mind. Who knows what the end is anyway? We can have a sense, a vision, a general direction of where we want to end up. But our journey will shape the ending. An amorphous goal becomes solid, real, tangible by the end. The information I gather along my journey helps me clarify and zero in on the goal. And the journey itself helps me incorporate information, assess it, pay attention to my visceral reactions and responses to situations and opportunities (very different things, reactions and responses), heed my emotional signals, and shift course ever so slightly to get to the end that is my "right fit.

"God Grant me the Serenity to accept the ones I cannot change, Courage to change the one I can, and the Wisdom to know that one is me."

about changing the world

Of late, many e-mails and magazine articles that cross my transom emphasize my role in transforming first my own world and then the rest of it. The key is self-love and spreading love. And the reward is happiness, inner peace and harmony - and world peace.

There are myriad suggestions for how to demonstrate self-love and how to manifest happiness, many of which I've either incorporated into my daily routine and inner being or tried and found wanting for my own path and process. They include thinking positive thoughts of myself and others, seeking opportunity in what may seem like a disaster, learning one new thing every day, being open to new experience, asking questions rather than making assumptions, assuming the best, starting my day over, praying often and being constantly mindful of God, approaching life with the eyes and heart of a child, forgiving myself and forgiving others, letting go and letting God, writing, talking to a good friend, listening, meditating, chanting, going on retreats, sitting quietly, being in nature, gardening, playing with children, petting a cat, doing art work, giving of my time to help others, putting people first, looking inward to see what I am contributing to a situation rather than blaming someone else, not "shoulding" on myself, accepting where I am, turning my will and life over to the care of my Higher Power, going to church, walking on the beach, getting enough sleep, eating healthy food, exercising, aligning my will with God's will. I know I've done other things, but the list already is pretty exhausting.

And it all works! I am happier, more content and more at peace with myself than ever before. Or maybe it's a different way, because I've often been at peace and happy. I have felt the "flow" of balance and harmony when I'm engaged in love and service. It has a different quality today, deeper and solid. I know it will never go away unless I try really hard - and I'd probably have to start drinking again. That I hope never to do again, a day at a time.

It's like a sand bar, this solid core of peace within me. Sometimes it's low tide and the sand bar is very visible. My outward and inner peace are aligned, all is harmonious, and I'm feeling whole and complete in all aspects of my life. At other times, it's high tide and there are rougher waves passing over and completely covering that core. It's still there, but the externals are rougher, less harmonious, more painful, darker. It's easy to imagine that the core is gone, too, because it's not visible. Yet if I put my feet down, even if I have to completely immerse myself underwater to reach far enough down, I will touch that sand bar, that core of certainty and confidence in my highest good and faith in god. I really hate going under water so far because I'm afraid I'll drown, that the undertow will carry me away and kill me. So far, I've come up and out intact. And more and more, I don't need to venture below the surface to make sure that sand bar is there. I just trust that it is. I have faith that I'm OK no matter what.

Many times over the past couple of years my faith has been sorely tested, and I have wondered if all the "think positive" stuff is so much mumbo-jumbo designed to occupy we powerless wimps in the face of cruel raw power. The power of death, for example. How on earth or heaven can one remain centered when a six year old boy is taken from us? I haven't been able to very well. I talked to him at the cemetary on the 18 month anniversary of his death, and realized that he very much would want me to embrace life and forgive God and even the cancer. No, I don't know if he'd want me to forgive the cancer. I don't think he could have. But he would have wanted me to live fully and with the same kind of joy he exhibited. And Julia deserves my love and joy and happiness and inner strength.

Of course, one of the cruelest passages of my recent life was being fired from City Harvest. I would like to move on from it and believe I have made great strides in the past eight months. It shocked me so deeply because I worked hard to create a work environment based on love and service. I thought it was such an environment. So to be fired in such an unloving way with absolutely no appreciation for my years of service was and continues to be stunningly incongruent and unreal. I'm forced to accept that there was a point at which the environment stopped being loving and compassionate, well before I was fired. So many possible points - when I stopped going to as many meetings, after my friends left town, when I changed communities and became so isolated that I depended more heavily on work for human interaction to a possibly unhealthy extent, after 9/11 and my trauma and egocentric attitude, when I succumbed to paranoia and stopped trusting Liza, when I laid off 20% of the staff in a pretty inhumane way, when I allowed Naomi to be caretaker and guardian, when I started thinking I could write a book about my approach to management, when I identified myself with City Harvest exclusively. I don't know exactly when, or maybe it was all of the above, and more. The important thing is that I do realize that somehow I stopped living the life of love and service and instead began living a life of ego and dissatisfaction.

It got even worse for me when I took the job with NYRP. That was so much about ego and a big "so there!" to the City Harvest Board. And I was incredibly envious and jealous and feeling "less than" and "not good enough" and fat and stupid and just not enough.

That's when I began wondering if it was indeed possible to make any impact on the world at large. Here I've been sober and working on myself for almost a quarter century, and I am still at the mercy of my ego. I still want what I don't have. I want to have more, I want to be more, I want to do more, I want everything more, more, more. Even when I was at my most centered, my impact on others was short-lived. Their impact on me was much more powerful. I succumbed to the power dynamics of stardom and money almost immediately. It's taken me many months to dismantle the illusions and see what happened to me.

How then am I to have any effect on the world? How are any of us who walk the path of ego deflation toward love and service to do anything but work on ourselves? Leading by example is a great concept, yet so limited in effect.

All the articles, books, e-mails, TV and radio shows, albums, sermons and religious treatises are being read by millions of people. Obviously, reading them is not enough. People have to actually put the suggestions into practice. They have to practice ego-deflation in order to become faith-full, right-sized, able to give and receive love and service. That's hard work, a lifetime's work. I don't know anyone who does it perfectly. And I don't know if all of this individual work will really shift the world. Or if it will, I just don't know when the tipping point will be.

So many of us do try our best, and sometimes I catch a glimpse of that perfect serenity and feel it flow through me. Then I go to the CVS and there are no parking spots and I have to practice faith and letting go and asking "how important is it" as thoughts like "what are all these people doing here?" fly through my mind. Or I arrive at work with my heart open only to hear the boss lace into me for being wasteful and not thinking. And she thinks she's perfectly OK. To her and to so many other rich and/or famous people, it's OK to be selfish and cruel to the "little people." Yet they study Kabbala or Buddhism or yoga or any of the other traditions that seemingly emphasize selflessness and self-forgetting. always read that as meaning "egoless" but I must be wrong. I also thought that love for others meant kindness and compassion. I must be wrong.

Maybe I'm just underestimating how very hard it is to be on a path toward ego-lessness, love, compassion and service. I find it difficult, and I've been on the path for 25 years. I've had some pretty major ego-deflating experiences - blessings in very good disguises. If it's hard for me, it's hard for other people. If I succumb to the blandishments of material success, how much harder it is for someone to resist them when they have so much material success already? I think I see now why so many prophets and saints and gurus and boddhisattvas have gone into the woods or the desert or caves, and adopted poverty. It's only when the material is irrelevant that the spiritual can become all.

There isn't any agreement that it's better to embrace love and service. Religions seem to encourage this, yet there is so much infighting and power politics within every church and religious institution that it's clear the words are having little impact on the ego and the behavior. The rich and powerful agree that they are special, better than most of the rest of the world. They even have different AA meetings, a pretty blatant manifestation of ego and fear in a program specifically designed for ego deflation. Love and service require some sacrifice. How willing are people to make sacrifices?

When it comes down to it, I need to focus on myself and being a person I want to live with. For me, it does mean love, service, compassion, kindness, an open heart, generosity, and self-love. I wish it were contagious, I wish what I do would help change the world for the better. I am still too much of a cynic to think that will happen. Who knows, though? The thing is for me to focus on what I can do, which is work on myself. If everyone in the world started seriously working on themselves and agreed that love and service were the goals, we'd have no wars if only because no one would have any time to fight them.