grief

Helpless

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

Helpless is a feeling. That having been said, it is a subset of “feelings” that I have written about (and that Deb and I have written a book about incorporating all of my feeling blogs). Describing helpless as a feeling is the best way I can define helpless, just as all words representing deep feelings are undefinable. While you can’t define such feelings, you can see the effects of these feelings, and the outgrowth of these feelings in some kind of expression. Expressions of feelings are always physical, emotional, cognitive, or active. I want to discuss the nature of this very important feeling, which means primarily the effects true helpless has on an individual or a group of people. I will also touch on other topics that relate to helplessness, which are genuine depression, feigned helplessness, the value of genuine helplessness, and how to handle helplessness. But first a couple of stories.

Stories of helplessness

This past week I have had no less than three men speak of feeling helpless. One man, a Catholic priest, chose to seek my counsel regarding the effects of the current pandemic had on him and on his parishioners. He reported that he had two issues: the feeling of loss and the fear of the unknown effects of the virus. Then he told me first of the worries he had about catching the coronavirus, or perhaps his sister catching the virus together with the effect that such a thing would have on her family given that she is a single parent. While painful, he could see himself coping with dying, or tragic as it might be, he could cope with his sister dying because he could see himself through these possibilities. However, what was most challenging for him was to think of how he might be called upon to serve his congregation. He noted, for instance, that many of his parishioners were seniors who could be most susceptible to becoming ill. If that were to happen, he thought, what would he do to serve them: stay at home and talk to them on the phone; visit one of them or a group of them at their homes or in the hospital, visit their relatives, or what? Secondly, he noted the concern for the forthcoming Holy Week, namely the week leading up to Easter, which is the most significant week of the church year. He wondered how he might handle Easter? As he spoke of these concerns, particularly those related to his congregation, I asked him how he felt. Helpless, he said. Then all changed in the conversation. Somehow, oddly, he felt better. We discussed, back and forth, certain theological and biblical matters related to fear, love, trust, and faith, but the lasting feeling he came to was helplessness. We discussed, for instance, how God is yet in command of the universe, and that we are but His servants in some way. But aside from the theological part of our discussion, he continued to feel “better” having admitted to feeling helpless. Just admit to feeling helpless. This priest’s helpless is essentially spiritual, i.e. seeing how God is in command, not he.

I saw Jack this week and heard the “H” word from him but in regards to a very different situation. Jack is married and desperately wants to stay married after seemingly been happily married for 30-some years. However, his wife is planning to leave him, apparently as a kind of separation, sometime soon. This I’d devastating to Jack. First, he is an evangelical Christian, and feels that such things are just wrong, but equally important he doesn’t know what he has done wrong, much less what he could do now to forestall such a drastic action as being separated. Jack is a very outgoing guy, a person who has been quite successful in his working years even though at the present he is working at a job that does not suit him. Jack has been successful in ministry, sales, and general management over these years and has generally been highly regarded. He has no particular addictions save one, which might call a food addiction. He is bereft of any understanding of why his wife is leaving him and has worked to hear what she has said about what she thinks he has done wrong. Yet nothing really makes sense to him even as he tries desperately to figure out what is going on with his wife. Our recent discussions have centered around the fact that he is a “we” person and then a “you” person despite his extraverted ways. (You might profit by reading my blog on “We, You, I people”). This means that he looks for connection, and when he can’t find it, looks to what is going on with his wife, always coming up with zero understanding of why she should be doing what she is doing. He feels helpless. Jack’s helplessness seems rooted in the fact that he has a deuce of a time coming out of his “we” and “you” orientation towards an “I” orientation, meaning who he is, how he feels, what he does, and what he says. Jack’s helplessness is his difficulty, almost impossibility, of looking at himself rather than his wife and their relationship.

The third man I saw this week speaking of helplessness is a person who, indeed, is suffering from a Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). You must know by now that I use this diagnostic label, or any diagnosis for instance, very rarely and with great caution. People use the term “depression” so freely, as with all other popular diagnoses, that the word is meaningless for the most part. The symptoms of MDD are disturbances in three areas of life: sleeping, eating, and energy. True MDD sufferers may suffer from all three or just one, but the primary symptom of MDD is energy, usually low energy. We call this condition anhedonia, which means lack of energy, fatigue, or lack of interest and drive. Such is the case for Bruce. More specifically, when we were working together, we addressed an early family situation that was less than functional, and so I asked him how he felt when he was a child in this situation. “Helpless,” he said. This is a guy who survived and thrived in life somewhat based on a life of “just doing what is needed to be done,” and how has collapsed. Why? He ran out of energy. Anhedonia. His brain is saying something like, “It’s time for you to take a time out and rest until you can finish all these feelings that you have necessarily repressed for decades.”

These three stories just this week, and many more in previous weeks. I did my best to help these guys feel helpless. Help them feel helpless, you say? Why? More later. Now, to discuss some helplessness that is really not helpless.

False Helplessness

This is a delicate discussion. Delicate because I am loathe to use words such as “false,” much less lazy, avoiding, addicting, lying, and such that are derogatory with no real value. Such words only serve the speaker, not the individual. This having been said, many people have fallen into a genuine feeling of helplessness because they have not grown up. Not grown up; what does that mean? It means that some element of emotional/social maturity has eluded them for some good reason. The two origins of failing to grow up (emotionally and socially) is deprivation or indulgence. Plus, both of them always lead to shame. The deprived child puts up a big fuss because she is not receiving what she needs, and then she is shamed for wanting what he actually needs. The indulged child puts a bit fuss because he thinks he should have everything that he wants, and then is shamed for wanting more than he should have. Whether from deprivation or indulgence, a child comes to view him/herself as helpless in life: helpless to get what he wants or needs. We can call the indulged child spoiled or the deprived demanding, but both of these children are just wanting to get from the world what they actually need. The deprived child needs to have nurturance and guidance; the indulged child needs to be limited. However, when one has had either of these unfortunate circumstances (and some children actually receive both, oddly), it is rare that they ever find a way to get away from feeling helpless because they continue to think/feel that the outside world should provide to them what they want. There is little distinction between wants and needs in such children, nor in the adults they become. Even though we who have received a modicum of limitation and encouragement might think otherwise, people in this feeling of helplessness truly feel and think that they are not able to do something. At this point people in this emotional/social immature condition find some kind of reasoning or addictive behavior that keeps them helpless.

Of the many people I know who truly feel this false helplessness I know of a woman who feels completely at the mercy of one or more physical ailments she has, a man who “can’t” find a way to get a job, a young girl wo at 14 really “needs” someone to help her remember to flush the toilet, a boy of 7 who thinks that he should win every game and it is “unfair” when someone else wins, a person in poverty thinking that rich people should give him money, and a wealthy woman who thinks that she has to protect her millions from the dangers of such people.

It is a challenge to feel any kind of helpless, but when a person has had a life of feeling helpless, it is extremely hard. And it is hard to befriend such a person, and harder yet to deal with such a person in your family.

A personal story

So do ever feel helpless? Not much, not often, and not for long, that is until recently. I am not at liberty to discuss the exact nature of my feeling helpless except to note that it has to do with what I should do and should not do in dealing with a particularly challenging family member. (By the way, this is not Deb, as she also feels some of the helplessness in this situation.) Given that my value system is “God first, work second, wife third, friends fourth, and family fifth,” I have found that I have needed to examine how I need/should deal with this family situation. It has been much like that I heard of from my priest patient, and it has brought me to my knees more than once. I feel a certain common feeling with him as I traverse these murky waters. So this brings me to the “so what” and “what can we do” part of this blog.

What can we do about feeling helpless, and perhaps get over it?

  1. Absolutely #1: accept that you feel helpless. If you don’t do this, you will not be able to manage it, find ways to survive, ultimately find ways to thrive, and ultimately find a place for normal helplessness in your life. This goes for the short-term helplessness of the coronavirus, the intermediate term helpless of serious depression, or the lifelong feeling of helpless due to indulgence or deprivation
  2. Come to grips with the fact that you, along with every other person in the world, feel helpless from time to time. It is the way of the world. How many people have you heard on the street who have said in regards to the current epidemic, “You have to accept what you have and get through it.”
  3. Avoid a tendency to try to fix helplessness. Helplessness can’t be fixed. It has to be faced, felt, and finished, just like every other difficult feeling. Face it; feel it; finish it. You don’t fix it.
  4. Share your feeling of helplessness with just one trusted friend, hopefully someone who will not think that s/he has to fix you, but can share with you this feeling, just as we need people to share our loves and our losses.
  5. Find a way to accept this helplessness as part of the way the universe unfolds. For me as a theist, I find that it is profitable for me to remind myself that “God is yet in control the last time I checked,” noting that I certainly don’t like all that God does, nor should. For people who are nontheistic it is equally possible to find a way to see that, as Einstein said, “The universe is friendly”…eventually.
  6. Note that your feeling of helpless decreases when you begin to accept, talk to someone, allow it to run a course, and find a real solace in God or the universe at large.

The Centrality of Fear

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, mindfulness, Self-Awareness

Fear is the most important emotion that exists in the human psyche. Furthermore, fear is the most important emotion that exists in all animals. If it were not for fear, nothing would survive. Animals would not survive and humans would not survive. Fear has to be seen as “the most important” of the four basic emotions in order to fully utilize this life-saving emotion. If we, as humans, did not have fear as basic to survival, we would, for instance, would come to a precipice of a canyon and simply step off into the chasm below. Fear keeps us aware of the danger of doing so. Likewise, if we did not have fear, we would run right up to a ranging lion and try to pet him. If we did not have fear, we would not survive more than an hour in life.

I have written, in the company of several “feelings” blogs (now compiled into a book), about the “four basic emotions,” namely fear, joy, anger, and sadness. (Recall that I distinguish “feelings” includes physical feelings, emotional feelings, cognitive feelings, and active feelings.) Within this understanding, namely that we have these four basic emotions as well as cognates, I have suggested that fear is the only emotion that we have when we are born. Thus, an infant cries when s/he “feels” the danger of dying, namely when s/he feels hungry, soiled, lonely, or otherwise unsafe. The idea that fear is the only emotion that we are born with is central to the present argument that “fear is the most important emotion that we have in life.” It always has been and always will be. We must not denigrate fear as something that we have to get rid of or disparage as unnecessary. For us to mature in life, particularly emotional life, work life, play life, and relational life, we need fear as this most basic emotion that keeps us alive. That having been said, undue and unnecessary fear causes us such immense distress in life that fear, itself, starts to kill us. The task in understanding the centrality of fear is to see fear as this most important emotion that keeps us alive and then carefully develop the other emotions so as to have a meaningful life, albeit a life that is safe. A brief review is in order

The four basic emotions

  1. Fear: the only emotion that we are born with. It keeps us alive. An infant should get pretty much everything that s/he wants. The infant is either afraid or calm, not joyful, not angry, and not sad. Wants and needs are essentially the same: an infant wants only what it needs. Fear should be the dominant emotion of infancy.
  2. Joy: the second emotion that we develop, beginning in late infancy. Joy is related to having something and loving something, whether that be a rattle, cuddling with Dad, or mother’s smile. Wants and needs are beginning to separate: a one-year old or two-year old wants a bit more than s/he can have. A young toddler gets most of what s/he wants. Joy should be the dominant emotion in the second year do life.
  3. Anger: the third emotion that we develop, beginning in toddlerhood and lasting for several years, until about 5 or 6. During these years the child’s world expands exponentially, namely because of his/her walking and talking, which were nonexistent during infancy and marginal during the second year of life. Anger comes naturally to toddlers because they are learning to defend themselves against restrictions, limitations, and withdrawal. Whereas they got all of what they wanted in infancy and most of what they wanted in the second year of life, they get very little of what they want…because they simply want much much more than they need.
  4. Sadness. This is the fourth and final emotion that is developed in childhood. This occurs slowly as anger wanes and is replaced by the emotion of sadness as the child learns that s/he can’t have most of what s/he wants. If all goes well, by the time a child goes to school at age 5 or 6, s/he is aware that s/he won’t get most of what s/he wants, which then leads to social maturity. Social maturity, among other things, is learning to share with other people, getting some of what you want and the accompanying joy, losing much of what you want and the accompanying sadness. While fear is the most important emotion because of its survival value, sadness is the most mature emotion because everything we love, we eventually lose.

Obviously, no one gets through these stages fully developing all four emotions. People tend to get stuck in one of the first three stages. If I am stuck in stage one, which means that fear is the dominant emotion I have, it is distinctly possible that I was not safe during that year of life although there is the possibility that I was protected beyond infancy and came to believe that someone would care for me 24/7 like they did when I was an infant. Equally possible, however, is that I get stuck in stage 2, where I think I should have everything that I want and hence feel joy all the time. Frequently, especially for males, people get stuck in stage three where I am angry all the time because “they” won’t give me what I want, and I put up a big fuss about it. In this discussion I will concentrate on the effects of being stuck in stage one, fear. But before we tackle being stuck in fear, a brief note regarding the neuropsychological functioning regarding fear.

Neuropsychological function of fear

This means the brain operation causing fear and during fear. Simply stated, the brain’s first operation is that of safety, so anything that the brain perceives as dangerous precipitates fear. Remember that the brain keeps you alive by keeping you from danger of any kind. The brain, for instance, churns up physical defense against any invading species, whether an ant that bites you or a virus that attacks you. Secondly, there are some intrinsic fears that the brain has, albeit is very few. The brain is automatically afraid of falling, starving, and being unable to breathe, so the brain churns up fear in order for you to do something about such things, namely step back from the ledge, get something to eat, or swim to the top of the lack if you’re drowning. There may be a natural fear of snakes, but that is yet questionable. Thank you brain for doing all kinds of things to keep me safe. But what about the things that are not natural, like starving and falling, that the brain things are dangerous. The brain has learned that some things are dangerous. The brain does not naturally know, for instance, that it is dangerous to walk in front of a speeding car.

There are many other things that the brain has learned are dangerous, like loud noises (ambulance sound), light flashes (fire), and deep water (drowning). Additionally, for our current purposes, the brain learns that there are practical and social things that are dangerous. It is dangerous to pick up hot metal, but the brain has to learn that. Much more complicated, however, are the things that are social, like social rejection, loneliness, disapproval, and shame. This is where the mind comes in. You might want to review my blog on “mind over matter,” where I discuss the desire that we see the brain as a machine with only concern for pleasure and safety, or the lack thereof. The concept I propose is that your mind has learned that some social matters are emotionally unpleasant and hence tries to avoid such things, like rejection, loneliness, disapproval, and shame. Simply put, the brain receives a message from the mind that these social things are “dangerous” or at least unpleasant. The brain then responds to such things, and churns up some kind of fear of them: fear of rejection, fear of disapproval, fear of loneliness, and fear of shame. Unfortunately and importantly, however, the brain does not distinguish between things that are dangerous. So, the brain eventually “feels” the danger of someone not liking you the same way it “feels” the danger of speeding car. The brain will churn up the chemical cortisol in order to keep the mind “vigilant,” i.e. hyperaware of the danger that the brains senses. Once the brain learns from the mind that social rejection and the like is “dangerous,” the brain will continue, all on its own, to equate the danger of social rejection to the danger of a speeding car. Then, we can get stuck in fear

Stuck in fear

Most people are stuck in fear. Most people. Undue and often unnecessary fear comprise the heart of what I do with most people. It is no small task to help people feel through and eventually get totally beyond unnecessary and undue fear. Unnecessary fear includes fear of the dark (which, by the way, is not natural), fear of goblins, and fear of all males or all females. There are reasons people are afraid of these things, but the reasons are historical, meaning that males, females, dark, or the alleged presence of goblins was somehow a part of their history. Undue fear is fear that should be small but has become large. It is necessary to be slightly afraid of a speeding car, but since most people speed most of the time when they drive, this fear should be mild, or modest at most.  It is the things that we have learned to be afraid of that most inhibit us in our daily lives and prevent us from succeeding in life. That which I deal with most frequently in my office is the fear of other’s disapproval together with the fear of failure. Over the past week I have heard:

  • A man afraid of the disapproval of his boss with whom he needs to have a conversation about a potential move from one department to another, a fear that exists in this man despite the fact that his boss has previously given him the green light to make such a move
  • Fear of doing Algebra. This young man, although bright and mathematically inclined, has avoided doing Algebra because he feels “retarded” (his words) when he can’t do something right or remember to put the minus sign where it belongs
  • Fear of a wife’s rejection of his sexual overtures
  • Fear of catching the coronavirus and keeping “social distance”
  • Fear of being alone the rest of his life
  • Fear of going back to work
  • And many others

These people are “stuck in their fear.” All of these fears have had to do with history. The young man’s fear of his boss’s disapproval comes, interestingly, from a very fine childhood and adolescence where he received very little disapproval because he was pretty good at everything and very outgoing. Now, a young man in the real world of work, he is ill prepared for failing and/or being challenged. I told him that he “hasn’t had enough failures and challenges” to become resilient to them. Resilience to such things means that you feel hurt, feel sad, examine what you have done and what they have said about what you have done, and make adjustments. It doesn’t matter whether the possible judgment is right or wrong. It you are judged, you will be hurt and eventually sad. The man who is afraid of going back to work has never really found work exciting and meaningful. He keeps a constant vigil of “I should go back to work” while at the same time doing everything he can do to avoid looking for work. He is stuck in fear, something we all suffer from time to time. We need to get over undue and unnecessary fears, but how do we do that?

Getting over fear

The very first thing you do to get over fear is to admit to it. We used to say in the 60’s, “If you can name it, you can claim it.” So, this first step in overcoming fear is to admit that you are afraid. Admitting to what you feel, no matter what the feeling, is always the first step to being in control of the feeling. Joy doesn’t require a lot of control although there are occasions where joy can be so great that you do or say something that is harmful. Sadness doesn’t need much control except for time and place for being sad. Anger needs a fair amount of control until you can get to the place where you are not angry, but rather afraid and sad. But fear is very hard to deal with because it is “the most important emotion” that we have and the most basic to our survival. So, notice that you are afraid.

Then you need to guard against trying to fix the fear or rationalize yourself out of being afraid. You can’t fix fear, you can’t push it away, and you can’t figure it out, not until you accept that you are afraid. If you find yourself afraid of the dark, for instance, just notice it, admit to it, and you will find that you become almost immediately less afraid.

Having acknowledged that you are afraid and guarded against trying to fix it or quell it, you will note that almost immediately, that as your fear subsides naturally, you feel a kind of sadness coming over you. What has happened is this: you are afraid of something that might happen in the future, whether the future is seconds away or years away. When you then imagine that something might happen in the future that is bad for you, you will be imagining that you will lose something. This “something” could be money, property, opportunity, success, or someone’s approval. You are now thinking and feeling about this future loss even though it hasn’t happened. We talk a lot about this conquering fear with allowing “anticipatory sadness” in our former book, and address it more in our current book. This process of allowing anticipatory sadness to replace fear takes a lot of practice, and it is very hard to do mostly because your brain does not want you to be sad; the brain just wants you to have pleasure. The brain does not understand the love-based nature of sadness, which can be very life-enhancing as we give up what we have lost, are losing, or might lose. If you do this, you are ready to think.

Thinking should come only when you are no longer afraid and no longer sad. You can really think about what you are afraid of and what you might lose if you can truly look at the present, the past, and the future. Looking at the present means where you are in the immediate moment seeing something that you are losing in the moment; looking at the past means looking at the losses you have had; looking at the future means looking at what losses you might incur in the future. This is a time to think: past, present, and future. As you do this thinking…after you have finished feeling…, you can truly see the things you love and be better at loving. When you’re better at loving, you will be better at losing: past losses, present losses, and future losses. In doing so, you will find that you have overcome your undue fears and your unnecessary fears, and have retained the ones that are truly valuable, like getting out of the way of the speeding car. Maybe even getting away from an undue critical person in your life. But this means doing something.

Doing something is the final element to conquering undue and unnecessary fears. You have to do something to get over being afraid of what might happen, be it failure or criticism. Doing something can come only after you have felt, finished feeling, thought, finished thinking, and have come to a place where you  need to do something. Sometimes, you will find that you really don’t need to do anything at all. Sometimes you will find that you need to do something drastic like moving out of town, leaving your spouse, or quitting your job. Most of the things you are afraid of are between these two extremes of doing nothing and doing everything.

As you process the fear in your life, you have to admit to it, feel it thoroughly, note the anticipatory sadness that is always under fear, think a bit, think more clearly, and eventually take some kind of action. Note this: it is a lot easier to go on being afraid than doing something. This is the essence of being stuck: feeling afraid instead of doing something. It is easier to imagine what I might lose and be afraid than to actually step out and say something or do something and face the real possibility of failure or rejection.

Just for fun, look up a Maltese saying about worrying.

I wish you well

Wanting It Both Ways

Ron Johnson Discovery, Feelings, grief, mindfulness, morality, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

I recently had a therapeutic hour with a patient who “wants to have it both ways.” I know exactly how he feels because I have had the same desires, as have many people who privilege me by coming to my office for my presence and counsel. Let me explain what “wanting it both ways” means. It means that you want two things, both valuable, that are incompatible. Like, I would like to have a million dollars and I don’t want to do what it might take to make a million dollars. I don’t exactly know what it would take for me to make a million dollars, but I suspect that if I did what millionaires do, I might be able to do it. I have a patient whom I recently saw together with his wife. During the conversation, which included finances, the man said that they had lost a million dollars during the recent economic turndown and stock market decline. A million dollar loss, I thought; what does that mean about what this man is worth? My conclusion, if my figuring is correct, is that the stock market is down about 25% and so losing a million dollars that suggests that this man (and his wife) used to be worth 4 million. Interestingly, this man reported to me that he often worked 80 and 90 hours a week to build his independent business. He evidently did this for many years and now a man of about 60, he is hoping for an early retirement and bask in the sunshine. So, here we have guy who’s worked his ass off for like 30 years and made his millions. What has been the cost? Why do you think I’m seeing his wife and him in my office? Is it not obvious? He has worked and worked but he has not put anything like 90 hours a week into his relationship with his wife and kids (now grown). He hasn’t put 9 hours into a relationship with his wife. Now, what he has done is quite remarkable, if we singularly see that he has made millions of dollars by his blood, sweat, and tears. But the cost has been the marriage. I am now working with people who are not only substantially different in personality. He is an ESTJ and caretaker/analyst temperament; she is ENFP and lover/player temperament for those of you familiar with such things. These differences have never been noticed, much less appreciated with the result that they have been unhappy together for years if not decades. The more remarkable thing about this scenario is that this hard-working, intelligent and honest man seems to think that the millions he has made should offset the lack of any kind of depth relationship with his wife. He wants it both ways: work all the time and make his millions, and then expect that his wife would honor, respect, and “appreciate” him, as he has often said. Not going to happen. He can’t have it both ways. He can’t have his millions, wrought by his hard work, and have a meaningful relationship with his wife. He really doesn’t get it…yet. We’re still working on it. By the way, his wife, as noticed by her personality type and temperament, also wants it both ways: she wants the millions but also wants a relationship. This man and wife collectively “have it both ways,” but one of them has the millions while the other has the desire for an intimate relationship.

“Wanting it both ways” covers a multitude of sin, meaning multitude of situations where people seem to think that they can have two things that are incapable. We have recently taken the responsibility of caring for our 14-year old grandson due to a complex set of circumstances, agreeing to this arrangement for a period of a few months, or less if it work out well. My grandson is bright, loving and kind, but he has no interest in doing any kind of work, no real passion, no direction, nor any purpose in life. He is effectively 7 years old emotionally and socially, meaning that he wants to play all the time like typical 7-year olds want to do. Nothing wrong with wanting to play all the time, but by the time you’re 14, you would think that you would have some understanding that life is a combination of work and play, that those two elements are intrinsically related, and come to grips with the fact that you have to work to play. Unfortunately, he has not learned this fact, so he tolerates work of any kind, always looking to race through it and get back to playing. There are many other children that are in this situation, almost always due to indulgent parents who didn’t provide the balance of loving and limiting. I wrote a blog (and a book) that I entitled “The 4-8-12 Child” that describes many children. My grandson got too much loving and not enough limiting, or perhaps more accurately, not a balance of the two. He wants it both ways: play all the time and have the privileges that only work can provide, like money, success, and a spirit of pride in work.

The wanting it both ways phenomenon comes in many forms, not only in adults and children as illustrated, but with one’s own life. Another man that I see is also very bright with a deep sense of intuition, particularly about other people. It may be his most important gift.  Recently, I had a conversation with him in which we talked about how he is able to “know” something about other people. He would like the privilege of telling people what he “knows” about them. He would also like to have the security that he will not hurt the other person, much less be rebuffed by the other person. Additionally and importantly, if he “knows” something about someone and says what he knows, he might actually discover that he sees only part of the picture of the other person. So his intuitive knowledge, while accurate, may be one of several matters that are relevant to the other person. This might be like someone telling me that I did not  put together colors in my attire for the day, and then telling me that the colors were out of sync without knowing that I am color blind and do not see colors the way most people see them. Now, it could be that I could profit from my friend’s analysis of my color scheme for the day, but it would be equally possible that I would be offended, perhaps depending on what else was going on in my day. So this individual who would like to be able to “know” something about other people, speak his intuitive knowledge, and be confident that his speaking will be well received, is not possible. He can have it one way or the other. In other words, he can speak his intuitive knowledge and take the consequences, which are unknown. Or he can keep his knowledge to himself and take the consequences. The consequences, by the way are, on the one hand, the distinct potential of hurting or harming the other person, or on the other hand, failing to say something to this person that might be life enhancing or even lifesaving. He would like it both ways. Nothing so out of the ordinary to want “your cake and eat it too,” but you can’t have both.

I would like to be able to be face-to-face with everyone during this time of medical caution during the Covid crisis. I really don’t want to do mostly conference calls with patients although I have already done three this week. I do them because it is required of some people to do them, whether out of state, out of city, or simply by individual choice. So, I can’t have it both ways, i.e. see patients face-to-face and occasionally shake hands or hug some of them, and take the chance of acquiring, or God forbid, spreading some kind of disease. I have to decide how I shall meet this current crisis.

I am not the only person who has to decide how to acknowledge that we can’t have it both ways despite the desire to do so. We all have to make this kind of decision every day: speak or don’t speak, hug or don’t hug, laugh or don’t laugh, swear or don’t swear, tell the truth or tell a while lie out of respect for the other person, and many more such difficult decisions. I think, however, it is not a “decision” so much as it is a discovery of what we should do in situations when we want it both ways. To discover is to listen to one’s inner spirit, not so much one’s thoughts, not one’s emotions, not one’s normal way of going about life. Inner spirit is never wrong, but it is deathly hard to see, feel, trust, and act upon. Then, when I have trusted my inner spirit and discovered which way I should turn in a certain situation, I will then be sad. Why will I be sad? Because I will have lost one opportunity for the sake of the other. If I force a hug on someone who might not like it, it might be good for him or bad for him, but if I think it is necessary to hug him, I will need to take the consequences of my action. The only way I can discover whether I should hug him or not is to find, trust, and follow my inner spirit.

If we can’t have it “both ways,” what can we have? We can discover which of two (or perhaps three or four) ways to go: speak or not speak, move or not move, hug or not hug, swear or not swear. What are we trying to discover? We are trying to discover what it right to do. How do we know what is right? By find, following, and trusting our inner spirit, a spirit that is never wrong. While the spirit is never wrong, the words, lack of words, action, or lack of action, might be wrong in some way. So, if I have discovered what is right, I must conclude that it is right for all concerned. Einstein said that the universe is “friendly” and God is not chaotic, or as Desiderata says it, “whether or not it is clear to you, the world is unfolding as it should.” The “right” may be hard on you or good for you, hard on the other person or good for him, or maybe a mix of all of these. Finding the right means pushing away any and all concern about what you think and feel, as well as any concern about what other people might want and feel to find the “right” thing to do. You can learn from your thoughts and your feelings, but then put them aside and do the right thing.

You will not succeed in this endeavor. By this I mean that you will do your best to find the right thing to do, and then sadly, realize that you didn’t trust your spirit enough, listen intently enough, said poorly constructed words, or taken action that was not entirely thought through. But you will have done your best: speak or not speak, acted or not acted. And whatever discovery you made for words or action, you will most assuredly be sad. You will be sad because you can’t have it both ways, whatever these two ways might have been. Deb and I have written about the centrality of sadness in life and have proposed that of the four basic emotions (joy, sadness, fear, and anger), sadness is the most important because it is based most squarely on love and the loss of love. We eventually lose everything that we love, whether property, person, or idea. An important part of maturity is coming to grips with this essential nature of human existence. The more you become familiar with taking action (or not), speaking (or not) and taking the natural consequences of these words and actions, the more frequently you will be sad, and most importantly, the shorter this sadness will be.

So, go forth into the realm of uncertainty. Do as Luther suggested when asked how one could find God’s will: “study thoroughly, pray fervently, ask wise people, and then sin boldly.” “Sin boldly” means going forth into the unknown, but with confidence that you have done your best to trust your inner spirit where God most certainly resides.