YOU MISTAKENLY CONSTRUCT YOUR OWN SUFFERING
I was driving a male friend of mine somewhere across town, and he was in quite ‘a state’, hardly able to talk about anything except what was consuming him: his girlfriend had just broken up with him. He’s a good-looking guy and girls had never been a problem, he’d waded through and broken up with more than his share of girls and had never been bitten deeply, before this. But he was in deep with this one, so he was hit pretty hard when she broke it off.
I didn’t offer all the consolations and advice that most people offer, I was simply my usual quiet self, open to the situation, not forcing any replies, just sitting there driving and knowing that if he said something that urged me to respond, I would. Finally he was really squirming, acute in his confusion and pain, literally unable to sit still or stop fidgeting in the car seat beside me, and said,”I just don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to get her back; I don’t know what I did wrong.”
Then ‘it’ came to me, that wonderful little clear comment I faithfully wait for; I said, “What makes you think you did anything wrong?” He immediately said, “Well I…” – he didn’t even make it through the ‘I’, it was cut off in mid-I, he just shut right up, became still. He saw it.
He saw that his entire pain was built around an assumption he constructed, an assumption that the only reason his girlfriend left him was because he had done things wrong. An assumption that if only he could figure out what those things were, and change them, then she would take him back. My little question exploded that construction and bit him deep. The rest of the drive, he didn’t say a word, he stared out the window, you could see the clarity kicking into place.
He was seeing that a relationship doesn’t need for someone to do something ‘wrong’ to end; it can just end because one or both people realize it’s not what they want, that this person isn’t who they want after all, and that maybe no amount of change can help that. I think he could see how he had been wearing down his own self esteem about this, when really he is a wonderful person, he is not to ‘blame’ for anything causing the breakup, that the relationship simply didn’t have enough spark for his ex-girlfriend to want to continue. From fidgeting in his seat and being in acute emotional turmoil, I watched him become quiet, thoughtful, I watched his power return, he sat up straight again, he became present again. For the ten minutes after the moment I made that comment, neither of us said a word, and when we reached our destination, we didn’t mention his breakup or my comment or anything about it, we moved right along with our next business.
That is the beauty of making a comment that explodes someone’s constructed ideas: it opens to a whole world of truth and possibility beyond.
People become so deeply entrenched in ideas they construct. Part of this I deal with in the article ‘Give Back Your Borrowed Mind’, where I talk about how your family, teachers, society, books, television, shape your personality as you grow, and construct ideas in your head that you eventually accept as real, you don’t really think them out for yourself. At its worst, this ‘constructed mind’ becomes a very constricted mind, narrow in understanding and wisdom and tolerance. But even at best, a constructed mind is still hurting you, keeping you in some form of learned prison. Here’s another example, one of my favorite moments:
YOU ALSO CONSTRUCT YOUR DISAPPOINTMENTS
I was in a coffee shop later one evening, a cafe that I frequented years ago and where I became familiar and friendly with the staff, as happens. One of them was a gorgeous young girl, just out of high school. Not just gorgeous, Jen was the kind of gorgeous that is so friendly, so girl-next-door, yet so supermodel stunning, she received more than any normal share of young guys stopping her at every turn to try out their best lines for a date. Jen and I hadn’t really talked before, beyond the pleasantries of any friendly barista serving a friendly customer, but on that evening at that time I was the only customer and Jen was the only staff.
This young man came in for a coffee-to-go, and the moment he saw Jen I saw the wheels begin to turn in his mind; men have a hard time hiding the ‘Oh My GOD!’ reaction when they first see her, but he carried it well, it was only a small stumble and then he put on the poker face and you could tell he was instantly and entirely focused on her, while trying to appear casual and suave. He wasn’t particularly creative though, and stumbled through some spur-of-the-moment asking her out on a date. She said she had a boyfriend, that was about it, and he left, still kind of stunned by seeing and losing such amazing beauty all in about two minutes during this unexpected moment.
After he’d gone, Jen looked over to me and smiled, and said, “I don’t really have a boyfriend. It just gets kind of annoying, you know; I don’t just wanna meet someone across the counter of a coffee shop, I want it to be special.”
Now, I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t know I was doing it, I didn’t plan to do it. No, I’m not talking about asking her out myself, ha ha; I exploded a construction of hers; it was acutely painful, almost violent, almost so subtle as to be a non-event, and completely transformative to her. Here’s what I said:
“What does it matter where you meet? Does he have to rescue you from pirates while you’re floating down the Amazon? You might meet a guy in a boring coffee shop like this, and that guy might be so wonderful, so honest and caring for you, that he can be the best person you could ever meet and give you a wonderful life.”
Before I finished the last handful of words, Jen looked… cornered, is the appropriate word. She stopped still, then started turning one way, then immediately the other way, not knowing where to look or go, really like a cornered animal at bay, and she suddenly threw up her hand and said, kind of between a yelp and a yell, “Stop talking to me!”
This was very unusual for Jen. Actually unheard of, to blurt out like that, she was always so calm and polite. But I immediately knew what had happened, even though I had no plan of doing it. I was just saying the thing that urged itself into my mind, and it had cornered her, directly attacked a constructed idea she’d held all her life about what ‘romance’ was, how romance needed to adhere to the exciting images in her girlhood dreams… my comment dynamited that ideal, and it hurt her, and she shifted into a primal self-protection mode.
THE TRUTH CAN HURT… BUT IT CAN GIVE YOU A REBIRTH
Anyone could have made a dozen different comments and they’d have flown right by Jen, having no effect. The truth of my comment is what exploded her construction. She recognized it instantly, there was a moment of sharp pain as some romantic ideal she’d held on to all her life was destroyed by this new understanding, she tried to escape what I was saying but she was literally cornered by this new idea, and even while cornered there was that last moment of fighting to keep her old ideal intact as she pushed that hand out and said Stop Talking To Me!
And then… it was beautiful. She stood frozen in place for a couple moments, then began moving around with her chores again. I just sipped my tea, smiling, because I recognized right away what had happened. We didn’t mention it again, she moved around in a kind of happy daze, we talked about minutiae like the weather and how business was lately, and the whole time she had become very happy, quiet, moving gracefully, thoughtfully. A construction she’d held onto since childhood had been exploded, yet it was replaced by something infinitely more beautiful:
An adult truth. She saw the truth in what I said. She saw that the old excitement of storybook romance starting from wild adventures had no real basis in creating a deep relationship in the real world. She saw that even meeting a man in some boring circumstance can be a thousand times wonderful if that man turns out to love her deeply, stay with her even through future hard times, create a strong and stable life with her… she saw it all and realized that it is so much more fantastic than the constructed dream. We never talked about that moment, yet since that moment and until the year she moved away, we became very comfortable friends, giving each other some kind of knowing calmness whenever we’d pass each other or sit and talk. One small exploded construction can pave the way for an entire part of your life changed for the good.
CONSTRUCTIONS CAN BE YOUR PRISON
I create mind constructions, and you create them. And if you want to really see who someone is, and really see who you can be, and really see through to the truth clearly, you have to allow your constructions to explode apart. They are prison, and you need to break free of them in order to live freely and authentically, and allow others to do so too.
Constructions become pervasive, controlling to entire personalities and relationships. How about the guy who is brought up thinking a wife, the ‘little woman’, is supposed to have kids, look after the house, cook his dinner, wash his underwear? He’ll romance her until they’re married, and after that he will have changed expectations once she is now this construction in his mind called a ‘wife’. Now, she has to do wife things, according to how he was brought up to think. Now, he wants to imprison her into his ideal of what a wife is supposed to do, and anything she does to threaten that – she wants to write a book, go to school, follow her dreams – he may oppose, may even violently fight to stop her.
Everyone learns constructions. When someone says they are an artist, or an environmentalist, you immediately begin to construct what you know about that ‘keyword’. I used to do weightlifting, I was quite muscular, and I trained Karate and did some security work (polite for ‘bouncing’). And my main job at the time? For years I wrote and drew comic books, and did commercial design. I didn’t fit into anyone’s construction. The gym and security guys would say, “You’re an artist? You don’t look like you’d be an artist!” My skinny geeky artist friends never quite got the idea of a writer and artist who wasn’t skinny and geeky and sitting home all day, or hanging at coffee shops for hours like them, either. I was big, strong, I’d take off hitchhiking for months with my backpack. I’d return and start drawing, or find some physical job. Not the artist lifestyle that people construct based on stereotypes.
Constructions confine you, and lead to your harming others, even in your thoughts. What do you think about foreigners? Lazy people? Farmers? Rich people? Street people? White people, black people, Asians, Pakistanis, children, old people? What do you think a ‘lady’ is supposed to act like, or a ‘real man’? What do you think of celebrities? Of a lawyer, or doctor, or politician? You have constructions, to some degree, about all people and all things. Constructions, preconceptions, can range from causing mild judgements and mistakes with the people around you, all the way up to severe racism and discrimination and violence.
Most cultures and societies in the world still have very rigid, confining constructions in the form of beliefs, traditions, jobs, status, caste systems, how men should act, how women should act, how the dynamics between us all are determined, what rules and laws should be. These are all constructed over the centuries, and some of them change and evolve with time while others are rigidly enforced, even through fear and violence.
EXPLODE YOUR CONSTRUCTED IDEAS
Instead of holding on to solid thoughts, opinions, things you think you know about others, things you insist you know… if you allow your mind to dissolve what you know, allow your ideals a constant state of falling apart, then you stop needing to defend yourself, stop needing to control others or confine them to the idea you have of them in your mind. You stop feeling confined by others’ ideas of you, and you stop confining others according to your ideas.
This is a truth: you don’t know, for certain, probably around 99% of the things you are ‘certain’ about. There is always more to learn, and even your understanding changes. As you age, become more experienced, become wiser and see deeper and deeper past old levels of understanding, your new frontiers of understanding are constantly becoming clearer than your old understandings. You can understand a statement or happening one way years ago, and if the exact same thing happens now, you might have a much deeper and wider understanding of it. And twenty years from now, will you have yet a different, even clearer understanding of that same thing? Yes! If you try to hold on to your old understandings, you severely stunt your growth, put a blockade in front of new learning, become very set in your ways, wedged into a path of narrow and immature understanding.
How would you change, what would happen, if you let go of any constructed thought of how your lover or spouse ‘should act’, what they ‘should do’? How would your friendships change, how would your job change? How would you change inside, and how would you respond if people stopped thinking they knew how you ‘should be’? How would you change and grow within your family, with the explosion of all those constructed expectations?
When you allow your constructions to explode apart, to be always fluid and not be allowed to congeal into rigid ideals, you become fresh in each moment, alive with the possibility that each new moment is bursting with.
EXPLODE YOUR CONSTRUCTED IDEAS