17. Too Soon Old Too Late Smart - Gordon Livingston (📱)
08 May 2017
Rating 9.5/10
Reading Notes:
I was reminded of a trailer for a self-improvement television series: “Your friends won’t tell you . . . but we’re not your friends and we will.” Well, maybe that’s what real friends do: say the hard things that we need to know if we are to be stronger, better, more generous, more courageous, kinder.
Happiness is not simply the absence of despair. It is an affirmative state in which our lives have both meaning and pleasure.
We are not what we think, or what we say, or how we feel. We are what we do. Conversely, in judging other people we need to pay attention not to what they promise but to how they behave.
“When all is said and done, more is said than done.” Most of the heartbreak that life contains is a result of ignoring the reality that past behavior is the most reliable predictor of future behavior. Woody Allen famously said that “Eighty percent of life is showing up.”
In general we get, not what we deserve, but what we expect.
The three components of happiness are something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to.
We love someone when the importance of his or her needs and desires rises to the level of our own
Once again we define who we are and who and what we care about, not by what we promise, but by what we do.
It is difficult to remove by logic an idea not placed there by logic in the first place.
we are much more often driven by impulses, preconceptions, and emotions of which we are only dimly aware.
My favorite therapeutic question is “What’s next?” The question implies both a willingness to change and the power to do so. It bypasses the self-pity implied in clinging to past traumas and recognizes the importance of leveraging goal-oriented conversation, insight, and a therapeutic relationship into changes in behavior.
Therapy, properly done, is a combination of confessional, re-parenting, and mentoring experiences. There is no perfect therapist for all who seek help. Each person has individual needs that cause them to “fit” well or poorly with a given therapist. In addition, the therapist brings his or her life experience, prejudices, and philosophy of change to the process. Often the attempt to connect is futile—occasionally even harmful.
The qualities of a good therapist mirror those of a good parent: patience, empathy, capacity for affection, and an ability to listen nonjudgmentally.
What all of us hesitate to admit is that we tend to be more helpful to people who are like us.
Any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least.
Most people know what is good for them, know what will make them feel better: exercise, hobbies, time with those they care about. They do not avoid these things because of ignorance of their value, but because they are no longer “motivated” to do them. They are waiting until they feel better. Frequently, it’s a long wait.
Life’s two most important questions are “Why?” and “Why not?” The trick is knowing which one to ask.
The most secure prisons are those we construct for ourselves.
Before we can do anything, we must be able to imagine it.
It is part of the symmetry of life that as we age we descend slowly back into infancy.
Whatever other obligations we have to our children, a conviction that we can achieve happiness amid the losses and uncertainties that life contains is the greatest gift that can pass from one generation to the next. Like all the values we wish to teach our children—honesty, commitment, empathy, respect, hard work—the supreme importance of hope is taught by example. To be happy is to take the risk of losing that happiness.
When confronted with a suicidal person I seldom try to talk them out of it. Instead I ask them to examine what it is that has so far dissuaded them from killing themselves.
It is the job of the psychotherapist to re-instill hope. I frequently ask patients, “What are you looking forward to?”
Simon and Garfunkel, in their song “Kodachrome,” summed up their secondary education as follows: “When I think of all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.”
Only bad things happen quickly.
Virtually all the happiness-producing processes in our lives take time, usually a long time: learning new things, changing old behaviors, building satisfying relationships, raising children. This is why patience and determination are among life’s primary virtues.
Nearly every human action is in some way an expression of how we think about ourselves.
I frequently suggest to patients that this criterion can be applied to any important life decision: How will this make me feel about myself?
children learn the majority of what they know about life from observing their parents.
The most damaging lies that we tell ourselves involve promises. “Nothing is so beautiful as a promise, right after it is given.”
The idea that I could reach a point when I would no longer miss my children was obscene to me and I dismissed it. I had to accept the reality that I would never be the same person, that some part of my heart, perhaps the best part, had been cut out and buried with my sons. What was left? Now there was a question worth contemplating.
This is what passes for hope: those we have lost evoked in us feelings of love that we didn’t know we were capable of. These permanent changes are their legacies, their gifts to us. It is our task to transfer that love to those who still need us. In this way we remain faithful to their memories. At my daughter’s wedding I borrowed some thoughts from Mark Helprin and constructed the following toast:
The love between parents and children depends heavily on forgiveness. It is our imperfections that mark us as human and our willingness to tolerate them in our families and ourselves redeems the suffering to which all love makes us vulnerable. In happy moments such as this we celebrate the miracle of two people who found each other and created new lives together. If love can indeed overcome death, it is only through the exercise of memory and devotion. Memory and devotion . . . with it your heart, though broken, will be full and you will stay in the fight to the very last.
It is always easier to keep doing what we’re used to, even if it’s evidently not working for us.
The primary goal of parenting, beyond keeping our children safe and loved, is to convey to them a sense that it is possible to be happy in an uncertain world, to give them hope. We do this, of course, by example more than by anything we say to them. If we can demonstrate in our own lives qualities of commitment, determination, and optimism, then we have done our job and can use our books of child-rearing advice for doorstops or fireplace fuel. What we cannot do is expect that children who are constantly criticized, bullied, and lectured will think well of themselves and their futures.
One of the things that define us is what we worry about.
Much of what we do is driven by fear of failure.
As their own people, our children succeed or fail primarily because of the decisions, good and bad, that they make about how they will live their lives. Parents can try to teach the values and behaviors that they have found to be important, but it is the way we live as adults that conveys the real message to our children about what we believe in.
Our primary task as parents, beyond attending to the day-to-day physical and emotional welfare of our children, is to convey to them a sense of the world as an imperfect place in which it is possible, nevertheless, to be happy. We can only accomplish this by example.
So, when parents, convinced of their crucial roles in shaping the futures of their children, ask me, “What can I do to make sure this kid turns out well?” they are often surprised at my response: “Not much, but maybe cutting down on the fights and not trying to control your child’s every decision might help to make everyone happier right now.”
It is our fallibility and uncertainty that make us human. Our constant challenge is not to seek perfection in ourselves and others, but to find ways to be happy in an imperfect world.
To laugh at ourselves is to acknowledge the ultimate futility of our efforts to stave off the depredations of time. Like the New Jersey hunter, we are in the grip of forces we cannot control, including, often, our own stupidity; yet we do not give up.
Humor also is a form of sharing, an interpersonal exercise. To share laughter is a way of affirming that we are all in this lifeboat together. The sea surrounds us; rescue is uncertain; control is illusory. Still we sail on—together.
Forgiveness is a form of letting go, but they are not the same thing.
Widely confused with forgetting or reconciliation, forgiveness is neither. It is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves.
To acknowledge that we have been harmed by another but choose to let go of our resentment or wishes for retribution requires a high order of emotional and ethical maturity.