Читать книгу Living A Loved Life - Dawna Markova PhD - Страница 13

Blessed, Blissed, Pissed, Dissed

I was leading a retreat called “Time Out” at the Sundance Resort with my husband Andy, my son David, his wife Angie, and our colleague Mary Jane. We had no idea that in two days, the World Trade Center in New York City would be attacked. Most of the fifteen participants were senior leaders of a large tech company that had just been bought by an even larger tech firm. Although the men and women were only in their forties, the severance packages they had been offered were so large that they’d never need to work again. The question that dragged each of them to the Utah mountains was “Now What?”

I wasn’t exactly sure how to begin the first session that morning, so I did what came naturally: I told a story: Once upon a long time ago, in a place very far from here, there was a desperately poor village nestled at the base of the Himalayan mountains. In the center of town, there was a huge clay statue of the Buddha. No one knew who had built it or why. Every sunrise, the monks and villagers sat at its base to chant prayers. Then they went on with their daily chores. One day, while sweeping snow off the statue with a straw broom, a young monk noticed a small crack in the clay. He tried to ignore it, but as the sun rose, he could see something glinting from deep inside. Not knowing what to do, he ran to the cave of the head monk, telling him that the Buddha was broken and something shiny was within it. The head monk was dismissive, not even looking up from his papers. “That statue has been here for generations. There are many cracks in it. Leave me alone. I am very busy.”

The boy sheepishly went back to his sweeping. By now, the sun was higher in the sky. He couldn’t keep himself from peeking into the crack one more time. Sure enough, there was something shining in there. Finally, he went to his mother, who trusted her son enough to follow him back to the statue. She saw the glinting too. She ran and gathered the other women. They all saw the shine. In less than ten minutes, everyone from the village was sitting around the statue trying to decide what to do. The head monk took a chisel and began to chip carefully around the crack. The glinting increased. Soon, no one could deny that under the outer layer of ordinary clay, there was a gold statue waiting to be revealed.

The townspeople argued late into the night. Should they destroy the clay Buddha and never have to worry again about money or leave it as it had always been? Finally, the head monk turned to the boy who had found the crack in the first place and asked him what he thought. Given this new recognition, the young boy was no longer afraid to speak. “I think the monks who built this Buddha must have known what they were doing. No one would want to steal or destroy an ordinary clay statue. But one made of precious gold would be the object of everyone’s desire.”

The monk nodded. Putting a hand on the boy’s shoulder, he said, “Maybe each of us is meant to learn that, underneath our ordinary exterior, there is gold at our core.”

At our retreat, Emily, a lanky blonde woman sitting across from me, raised her hand tentatively. “It’s a quaint story, Dr. Markova, but what has it got to do with why we’re here?” She chewed on her bottom lip before continuing. “I’m forty-five years old and have been quite successful as the first female CTO in the company. It wasn’t easy, believe me. I was the only person in my family to go to college. I never took vacations, sick days, or even holidays. I’ve had to work harder than any man would to get where I am today. This retreat is a first for me. I don’t have the slightest idea what my ‘gold’ is or how that’s relevant to what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”

Her words were sharp, clipped, her voice threatening to detonate into shrapnel if she let it loose. Her right hand was clenched. I went over and sat next to her, looking down at the fist in her lap. Very slowly, I said, “The cells in my body understand completely what it takes to be the first woman in a leadership position. How challenging it must be to have to let go of that.” I continued to stare at her hand. Emily looked down at the fist but didn’t open her fingers. She just shrugged. I continued. “There is an old Japanese saying: ‘Unclench the hand of thought.’ For you and me to get where we are in life, Emily, we’ve had to grab every tiny opportunity. We’ve had to know the answer to every question we were asked. But what was the solution back then can now become the problem, especially when the question that is being put to us is, ‘Now What?’ ”

Emily nodded, saying nothing, but her neck muscles softened and her eyes rimmed with tears. I extended my right hand clenched tightly into a fist in front of us and continued. “Nothing can get into a hand, or a mind, that is closed like this—not criticism, not insults, not put-downs. But it’s also true that no ideas or insights can get in, either.” As I spoke, she extended her arm like mine, fist facing upwards. I slowly opened my fingers. “What would it mean, what would it feel like, to ‘open the hand of thought?’ ” Each of our fingers unfolded slowly like peony petals in the spring. I slid my open hand under hers and asked if she was open to wondering about two questions until the next session. She nodded immediately.

“The first question, Emily, is what have you ever done that makes you feel both blissed out and blessed?” I waited for a nod and then went on, “The second question is what makes you feel pissed because something or someone that you care about is being disrespected?”

Letting her arm sink slowly down to her side, Emily smiled. “OK. Blissed and blessed, pissed and dissed, right?”

I looked out at the rest of the group, who were also smiling. “Right. I’m suggesting that all of us spend the afternoon in solitude held in the bowl of these mountains, wondering about when in our lives do we feel blissed and blessed and when do we feel pissed and dissed.”

After dinner, before we reconvened, Dave set up a video camera in the back of the room. Angie, who is a brilliant asker of open questions, sat next to Emily in the front. After the group gathered, the red light on the video began to blink. I asked everyone to “open the hand of thought” by observing without analyzing what was going to happen next. Angie leaned forward and asked Emily what she had discovered in solitude. The response was immediate. “The pissed and dissed were easy. They just popped into my mind while I was hiking. It pisses me off big time when girls and young women interested in science and math subjects are disrespected and redirected to more ‘appropriate’ majors. Furthermore, if they do manage to go on, they’re not even considered for senior technical positions.” Emily’s cheeks were flushed. “In spite of that, I feel blessed to have had a remarkable mentor who is the CFO at our company headquarters. It’s always felt as if she had my back. That’s one of the hardest parts about having to leave the company.”

Angie nodded and asked quietly, “What about the blissed?”

Emily shrugged. “I feel blissed when I walk in the country with my dog, but that doesn’t really count.”

Angie asked her about some of the places she had hiked. “When else do you feel blissed like that?” She leaned forward as if listening Emily into speech.

“Strange as it seems, I also used to feel blissed when I volunteered to help the kids at the homeless shelter near where I live do their math homework. I never thought of that as blissed until this moment, but it was just the same feeling as I have when hiking.”

I nodded and asked Dave to replay the video of that conversation without sound. I invited the rest of the group to call out what they noticed. At first, we were all quiet, but, after a few minutes, people started to laugh. Mary Jane commented that it looked as if Emily lit up. A man next to me said that Emily had become completely energized and enlivened talking about the kids. Everyone else nodded in agreement. Dave replayed it one more time with the sound turned on. Sure enough, as soon as Emily started to talk about helping the kids, her back straightened, something akin to a grin crept across her face, and both hands conducted her words like musical notes. In short, she lit up.

We spent the rest of the evening with everyone in the group interviewing one another while Dave circulated with the video camera. People then got to see themselves answering the questions and discovering what made them light up.

As we were about to close the session, I wrote the following formula on the flip chart in the front of the room: P = pd+b+b-I, and then explained, “In Emily’s honor I improvised this formula that I learned from author Timothy Gallwey. The big ‘P’ stands for the Promise Life made to the world the moment you were born. The little ‘pd’ stands for what makes you feel pissed off about the disrespect around you; ‘b’ is for the blessings in your life, and the second ‘b’ is for what you do that makes you feel blissed. Does anyone want to guess what the ‘I’ represents?”

Emily’s open hand waved in the air and she immediately called out, “I read Galway too! ‘I’ is for interference! The external and internal ways all of that potential gets interfered with.”

I reached out, opening my palm to slap hers, and said, “What I realized when I walked in solitude this afternoon is that telling the stories that have yeasted me and braiding them together so I can help others realize their potential fulfills the Promise of my life. Like you, I’ve interfered with it by closing my mind to the possibility that it could be relevant or useful. Many thanks for the lesson, Emily!”

In two days’ time, the World Trade Center was destroyed, and each of us realized just how relevant our learning could be.