“The first thing to drop is the story â€

Let’s have a look at the rest of the “storyâ€â€”
The Per­fect Day

As I wrote last week, the “Per­fect Day†exer­cise comes from a work­shop I used to run. Being a Zen guy, I’m fairly prac­ti­cal. I work from 2 sim­ple questions:

I call these ques­tions the Util­ity Test.

Most of us crave complexity

I notice that I am in trou­ble when I make things com­pli­cated. The “com­plex­i­fy­ing†process is a way of delay­ing tak­ing action. Here’s a client story from the year I spent coun­selling stu­dents at the Uni­ver­sity of Guelph. A cou­ple of my clients were Post­grad­u­ate can­di­dates, and had either a The­sis or a Dis­ser­ta­tion to write. Since the two I’m think­ing about were both women, let me use “she†for the rest of the story.

My client was both sad and anx­ious. She told me that she was in the Sci­ences and had a The­sis due—that it looked like it was going to be 95 pages long. She had no clue how to write such a large and com­pli­cated paper.

I let her talk—about her research, about com­plex­ity, about how impos­si­ble it was to write a 95 page paper.

I agreed with her.

She looked shocked! “But… but… what can I do?â€

I said, “You can’t write a paper. Here’s what you can do: Turn on your com­puter. Pull up Word. Type ‘Intro­duc­tion.’ Then, write the first word.â€

Her prob­lem was that she was look­ing at this big, bad project, of infi­nite size (those of us in the Human­i­ties are crack­ing up right now, and think­ing “Only 95 pages? My intro­duc­tion was 95 pages!†But I digress.) and complexity.

Let’s go back to my two ‘util­ity questions’:

I’m busy… stay­ing stuck!

What was she actu­ally doing?

Answer: Mak­ing her life mis­er­able, while not writ­ing her paper.

Is it work­ing for her?

YES! but only if her goal is to make her­self mis­er­able while not writ­ing her paper.

NO! if her goal is to write the paper.

See? Sim­ple!

Look at your Per­fect Day story. Read it, and let your­self feel what it would be like to have this way of being, exactly as you wrote it. Check in with yourself.

Ask your­self, “If I had this, would I be content?â€

Now, take a step back:

Make a list of all the things that must be done before you can begin to live your Per­fect Day.

This is your “com­plex­i­fy­ing list.â€

Now, let’s make a sig­nif­i­cant point here, ref­er­enc­ing back to my client.

In all cases, our egos are invested in keep­ing us stuck. We get to a cer­tain point—call it your comfort/discomfort point—and some aspect of your ego starts to toss up excuses not to move for­ward. So, “stuck†means “stuck in your present story.â€

Well, at least my head isn’t really stuck!

Many are the clients who get right to the point of liv­ing their lives fully, pas­sion­ately, and with engage­ment. There’s this ‘hic­cup,’ as they con­front their feelings—a sense of new and uncharted, risky, chargy energy aris­ing. Poof! They either stop ther­apy, or go into ‘defend­ing mode,’ or they argue that things are “Alright the way they are.â€

In a sense they are tying them­selves up in the knots of their fears, and not notic­ing the reper­cus­sions of being stuck. The under­ly­ing dis­sat­is­fac­tion hap­pens despite their suc­cess in other areas.

Drop­ping old ways of being, even painful ways, means risk­ing the unknown. Many would rather stay stuck in the familiar.

For my client to move through her stuck point, she had to

Here’s another ver­sion of stuck that may be familiar.

You have your act together in sev­eral areas of your life, and notice one of those dis­com­fort / stick­ing points in another area. Part of you knows you must ded­i­cate time and effort to push­ing through the block, yet you scare your­self into focussing your atten­tion on the stuff that is work­ing! You say, “See! I’m doing so well in all these areas!â€

And the unre­solved stuff goes back­ground, there to fester.

The point of the Per­fect Day exer­cise, and the other 2 ques­tions, is to get you to look at, iden­tify, and con­front any­thing that fails the util­ity test. In other words,

The paint­ing at the begin­ning of this arti­cle illus­trates a Zen story.

When asked, “What is enlight­en­ment?†the mas­ter put down the heavy bag he was carrying.

When asked, “And how does one then live an enlight­ened life?†he picked the bag back up, and con­tin­ued walking.

Put down the dra­mas, sto­ries, fears and eva­sions. Then, walk.

Next week, we’ll wrap this up with some sug­ges­tions about gen­tly hold­ing focus.